Promethium raises $6M to let businesses use natural language processing to get answers to complex questions

Data-driven decision-making will profoundly change business, but most enterprises are still mired in data that’s too big and complex to understand and act on. The ability to successfully leverage data for analytics has long powered such industry bellwethers as Google, Facebook and Amazon. While true real time analytics is now a strategic imperative for any data-driven business, significant cost, complexity and time barriers remain. With highly skilled data management expertise both costly and scarce, most enterprises don’t have the manpower they need to overcome the long delays in the discovery, prep and assembly of data.

Enter Promethium, an augmented data management provider and the first company to combine natural language processing with self-service analytics, which allows people to use plainspoken language to tap their organization’s data for answers to complex questions.

Today, Promethium announced it has raised $6M in funding to accelerate its go-to-market strategies and continued innovation of its Data Navigation System™ (DNS), which the company officially announced last October. The round was led by .406 Ventures with participation from existing investor Zetta Venture Partners. In conjunction with the funding, Promethium also announced that Graham Brooks, Partner at .406 Ventures, has joined its Board of Directors.

Founded in 2018 by Kaycee Lai, Promethium is the first augmented data management provider to allow users to tap their organization’s entire data estate for answers to questions asked in plainspoken language, eliminating the dependence on manual SQL scripting and increasing innovation cycle time by 100x. Promethium’s AI and ML-driven contextual automation software delivers actionable insight within minutes instead of months (with sub-second query times) while ensuring all data used to deliver information is fully governed.

Promethium is changing all of that. By automating 100% of the complex manual processes used to handle data as it’s prepared for analytics, Promethium is helping some of the world’s largest organizations accelerate their time-to-answers by up to 100x. The company’s AI-powered DNS is the first solution to combine natural language processing (NLP) with self-service analytics, which together deliver the ability to translate questions from business users into data management functions that instantly assemble the data for analysts.

Users simply ask a question in plain language, and Promethium locates the data, demonstrates how it should be assembled, automatically generates the SQL statement to get the right data, and executes the query. While organizations typically require months of complex manual labor to deliver data to the business unit requesting it, Promethium allows the business users themselves to automatically draw actionable knowledge from multiple data sources. With federated queries that run across all databases, data lakes and warehouses, Promethium provides fast and accurate answers within minutes instead of months (with sub-second query times), all while leaving the data in place.

“The response we’ve gotten after officially launching our AI-powered Data Navigation System has been nothing short of phenomenal,” said Kaycee Lai, CEO and Founder of Promethium. “Our customers are transforming themselves into data-driven powerhouses because we allow their non-technical business users to directly tap their organization’s entire data estate and quickly deliver value back to the enterprise. This is what real-time data analytics was supposed to be about, and with Promethium, it’s finally a reality.”

In addition to dramatically accelerating time to data’s value, Promethium automatically ensures all data is complete while identifying duplications and providing full lineage to confirm insights are trustworthy, making it easier to comply with government and industry regulations. This automated data exploration process takes the time from question to insight down from months to minutes, freeing up valuable resources inside an enterprise.

“As a thesis-driven investor, .406 Ventures realized that the manual work provided by data engineers was greatly slowing and reducing the impact of millions of business analysts. We have been searching for a solution that eliminates the friction preventing users from using analytics in real time to answer important business questions,” said Brooks. “Promethium solves exactly that challenge and enables analysts to leverage full enterprise data across different schemas, database technologies and locations. We are very excited to partner with the Promethium team as they bring their ground-breaking technology to market.”