What Is Sigma Computing And Why They Raised $300 Million
What Is Sigma Computing And Why They Raised $300 Million
With businesses facing an ever-increasing amount of structured and unstructured data flowing in from a variety of sources, being able to condense and translate all that data into concise images and metrics is a necessity.
Without a modern business intelligence solution, companies are missing out on crucial insights and valuable feedback that's buried within huge data streams. In order to make sense of it all, data visualization tools have come to the forefront.
Data visualization helps dig into large sums of data points, allowing companies to easily find meaning, trends and outliers. The right data visualization tools will take your streams of data and update in real-time, telling a story of your business's impact, performance and public perception. Best of all, these tools serve to make data easy and enjoyable to consume, even for those who don't deal with data on a day-to-day basis.
Now, the problem that arises when it comes to picking the right data visualization or business intelligence tool is that there are so many.
Whether you’re picking from the classics like Tableau and Looker or possibly looking towards some of the newer options.
There are so many to pick from.
And I am going to add one more. With their recent $300 million funding round, Sigma Computing is clearly going to try to make a mark in 2022. But what is it?
What Is Sigma Computing?
Founded in 2014, Sigma is a data visualization and business intelligence tool that seamlessly turns large streams of data into easy-to-interpret summaries, trends and stories. The goal behind Sigma is to allow any business user to effortlessly unlock useful insights. With no need to use SQL or any other code to explore data, Sigma makes data accessible to everyone. For data analysis professionals, in particular, Sigma's dashboard design is both intuitive and familiar.
This tool transforms the classic spreadsheet into something modern, living and robust. The spreadsheet-like dashboard brings your data full circle, without any of the shortfalls of a classic spreadsheet. While a normal document might crash or slow down as you begin exceeding a million rows, Sigma can effortlessly handle any amount of data thanks to the stable and powerful cloud data platform that supports it. This platform is secure, accurate and easy to govern for businesses big and small.
Latest Funding for Sigma Computing
One consideration when choosing new software--particularly for large companies who must invest in migration, onboarding and staff training to adopt a new software--is whether or not a given solution has financial backing. Without proper funding, software companies may struggle to provide the support or updates they originally promised and they can eventually disappear, leaving users to search for a new solution, potentially on short notice.
For these reasons, it's relieving to know that Sigma Computing, the company behind Sigma, recently announced that they have successfully raised $300 million in their latest funding round. This new funding is part of Sigma Computing's Series C round, which was led by D1 Capital Partners, XN and past investors like Sutter Hill Ventures and Snowflake Ventures, the latter of which is led by data warehouse company Snowflake.
The strong financial backing for Sigma Computing is promising, especially with the software garnering support from major data warehouse solutions like Snowflake. With that said, it's far from the only data visualization tool on the market, which is why understanding its features (and shortcomings) is essential to making a wise business decision.
Sigma Computing Features
If you're considering using Sigma for your business's data visualization needs, these are the top features to explore.
Spreadsheet Experience
By far, one of the most user-friendly, intuitive and powerful aspects of Sigma is the fact that this software adopts a highly-familiar spreadsheet layout. While this cloud platform does away with all of the scalability concerns of a traditional spreadsheet, most everyone will be familiar with the layout, which supports Sigma's goal of being cross-functional, accessible and empowering.
No matter one's technical expertise, they should be able to dive into Sigma and start digesting data with little to no learning curve. It's a codeless experience that is truly designed to appeal to a larger audience, easing the burden on data analysts and other professionals who must present information to non-technical stakeholders.
Community-Driven Approach
Community-driven analytics is becoming a standard in business. The purpose of the "community-driven" approach is to empower teams to discuss, share, contribute to and accelerate the discovery of new data insights. This is only possible by involving every team member in the business intelligence initiative, but that's hard to do when most BI tools are restricted to those with technical knowledge. Sigma's intuitive, user-friendly dashboard makes community-driven analytics achievable.
With Sigma, any user can contribute to a company's business intelligence goals and begin collaborating over data and insights. For the business, this results in stronger insights, well-rounded conclusions and the ability to make informed decisions on the fly. For employees, it also presents an opportunity to align with the business's bigger goals in a whole new way, even if they lack technical know-how.
Built for Cloud Data Warehouse
Trying to integrate tools into a cloud-native infrastructure when they aren't designed for that environment is simply a waste of time. Incompatibilities will delay and constrain, working directly against key business goals in areas where you need power and flexibility. This is why Sigma is ideal for cloud-native companies.
Sigma was designed from the ground-up to leverage cloud data warehouse technology, giving it a leg-up over other BI and visualization tools. With Sigma, everything connects together seamlessly, eliminating extractions while maximizing speed, accuracy and security.
Templates and Views
With the help of Templates and Dataset Warehouse Views, Sigma users can easily analyze and model data without ever touching code. These powerful features make creating dashboards and interacting with data easier than ever before. With basic knowledge of traditional spreadsheet tools, for example, a user can use views to create a table that automatically updates with the latest data from the cloud warehouse.
So Where Does Sigma Fit?
Sigma offers a lot of great features and its goal to be tightly connected to Snowflake is promising. Still, Sigma, like any BI solution is not perfect. Sigma does lag behind others when it comes to in-depth dashboards and visualizations.
Ultimately, Sigma’s recent funding round will provide them the opportunity to implement a whole host of new features that will help them stand-out in the crowded space that is data visualization.
I am excited to see where they go!
Jan 26 Webinar: RSVP today to hear how Seesaw used Rockset + Hightouch for Real-Time Analytics
SeattleDataGuy's subscribers who join get a free Rockset T-shirt
Seesaw provides a leading online student learning platform and saw it's usage 10x during shutdown. Their data infrastructure couldn't keep up with the growth for real-time analytics so they turned to Rockset and Hightouch.
In this webinar, learn how Seesaw:
Migrated from Elasticsearch, Amazon Athena, and custom python scripts to Rockset for real-time data analytics
Synced their DynamoDB to Rockset to power complex SQL queries that returned back in less than a second
Replaced brittle, custom built integrations to pull data from Rockset to Salesforce with Hightouch, saving valuable developer time
Sponsorship
Special thanks to Rockset. Rockset is a real-time analytics database service for serving low latency, high concurrency analytical queries at scale. It builds a Converged Index™ on structured and semi-structured data from OLTP databases, streams and lakes in real-time and exposes a RESTful SQL interface.
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In 2022, I am seeing more internships and jr. data engineering positions.
So there is a chance you might be able to find a role out of college...as long as companies don't expect 2 years of experience for a jr. position.
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Google Cloud Data Analytics 2021: The year in review
As I look back on 2021 I'm proud to see a fast growing number of companies use our data platform to unlock new insights, build new business models and help improve their employees’ and their customers' experience.
Data itself is just inactive information, useless without activation. The true power of data comes when it’s being used to build intelligent applications, help people make better decisions, increase automation and ultimately change how value is being created.
This year, tens of thousands of customers unlocked their data advantage with Google Cloud’s unified data platform. From breaking down data silos, building internet-scale applications, building smart processes with AI, building data meshes that span beyond their enterprise and turn data into an asset.
End Of Day 31
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