Coefficient wants to bring live data into your existing spreadsheets
With the explosive use of software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps, the average company now has more than 100 SaaS apps to manage – causing data to be cut across countless disparate systems. This makes analysis challenging. According to Forrester, between 60% and 73% of all data in a company goes unused for analysis.
Ideally, analysts need something that connects different enterprise systems, such as business intelligence and analysis tools. But these tools are often complex and unintuitive, causing employees to spend hours every day searching and gathering information. Looking for an answer, Navneet Loiwal teamed up with Tommy Tsai, with whom he had previously founded an e-commerce app, to build Coefficient, an app that brings live data into Google Sheets and other existing spreadsheet platforms.
“Tsai and I had been working in consumer technology for many years, and we saw a huge opportunity to bring consumer experiences to businesses,” Loiwal told TechCrunch in an email interview. Loiwal was previously a software developer at Google working on AdWords, while Tsai was an early stage engineer at the location-sharing smartphone app Loopt. “Most computer products are designed for the technical user, resulting in a poor user experience and low adoption for business users. We wanted to bring the power of technical products to the business user with the simplicity they expect in consumer life.”
To that end, Coefficient — which closed an $18 million Series A funding round today — is designed to cut down on the number of manual and repetitive tasks business users must perform daily to cross-reference data across systems. The platform sits on top of Google Sheets (with support for Excel on the way), and retrieves data from CRM systems, SQL databases and other SaaS tools.
Using Coefficient, users can create, share and automate live reports, set up alerts and write data back to connected SaaS tools. A template gallery provides pre-made spreadsheet dashboards for common reports used by business operations teams (think team KPIs, leadership dashboards, and decks and revenue analytics), which users can integrate with existing data systems to enable live data to power all charts in their spreadsheets. .
The coefficient’s spreadsheet supplement. Image credit: Coefficient
“Business users are more technical in the spreadsheet than anywhere else, but business teams are often forced to resort to archaic methods of managing data – requesting frequent updates from technical teams with data expertise or exporting raw data from dashboards or CRMs to report repeated, manual analysis, which reduces team efficiency and productivity,” said Loiwal. “Coefficient’s products extend the reach of advanced, connected data and analytics to business users, enabling businesses to become more self-sufficient through real-time connectivity to the data in their source systems from where they work: in spreadsheets.”
There is a lot to promise. And to be sure, Coefficient isn’t the first to try this kind of thing. Startups like Airtable and Smartsheet already offer spreadsheet-like user interfaces for organizing business data. Others have tried to put their own spins on the formula, like spreadsheets with apps and spreadsheets with detailed access controls.
At first glance, Coefficient actually sounds a lot like Actiondesk, which similarly connects to databases, CRMs and SaaS tools to feed data directly into Excel and Google Sheets. Like Coefficient, Actiondesk supports common formulas and offers templates to get you started.
But to its credit, Coefficient got off to a good start — Loiwal claims Zendesk, Spotify, Foursquare, Contentful and Miro are among its customers. Altogether, tens of thousands of people use the platform.
“We’re seeing our customers increase their contracts with us despite layoffs — a testament to the value of making business teams more efficient,” Loiwal said. “Additionally, with increased telecommuting and complex economic headwinds, companies need their employees to become more self-sufficient.”
Loiwal says the Series A proceeds will be used to expand Coefficient’s product offerings and “scale global operations.” In the coming months, the startup plans to add new SaaS system integrations and expand the scope of its reporting automation tools.
Battery Ventures led Coefficient’s Series A with participation from Foundation Capital and S28 Capital. To date, the company has raised $24.7 million in capital.
Neeraj Agrawal, a general partner at Battery Ventures, added, “It’s a testament to the Coefficient team’s product craftsmanship that users become evangelists, promoting adoption of the product throughout the organization… Coefficient products equip business users with the tools and automation needed. reach peak performance, a critical advantage amid an unpredictable macroeconomic environment.”
