When Noam Brezis, Pecan CTO and co-founder, and I met on our first day of grad school, we immediately knew we would have a long and fruitful friendship. We spent years researching brain processes using advanced machine learning and statistical methods, and we gained great gratification from it. But something was missing. We felt we could create something big together, but we didn’t know what that might be.
I remember the day when Noam said to me that it simply doesn’t make sense that BI and data analysts don’t have data science capabilities. That’s especially true since these folks know the data better than anyone else in their organizations.
Noam insisted that we had to drop everything else we were doing and focus only on developing a SaaS platform that enables SQL-oriented people to do full-blown data science. I was immediately hooked and excited, but being a pure academic at the time, my initial reply was, “What’s SaaS?”
By the time we completed our doctorates, we were ready to embark on a new, intense journey to bring this new mode of AI into the market. Three and a half years into that nutty ride, we couldn’t be more grateful or proud.
Our basic idea — to revolutionize how organizations adopt AI and data science, and to empower BI and business analysts to lead that revolution — has proven itself worthy and much needed. We see more and more customers leveraging data science models that were reserved, until recently, for advanced data scientists. Our customers are seeing tangible business outcomes that are improving to unprecedented levels. We see analysts, previously confined to visualizations and SQL queries of historical data, starting to build advanced ML models and provide high-resolution, item-level predictions to their stakeholders’ organizations. Enabled by Pecan, their work is significantly moving the business needle.
Just three and a half years ago, we would have never imagined that Pecan would raise more than $115M in such a short time and with such wide and successful customer adoption. We are humbled and filled with awe in seeing our mission through, and we will not stop until every organization possesses state-of-the-art data science capabilities, even if they lack data science resources.
We also want to offer great gratitude to our customers. You have made this journey possible, and your trust and partnership has helped us build and innovate. We will always be committed to delivering real value for you.
Finally, I want to personally thank our amazing Pecan team, who have made creating something big together a fantastic, fun-filled challenge. I am so proud of our team of ego-aware, value-devoted, creative builders. We are accomplishing great things within an incredible company culture.
We are thrilled to continue this journey together as we expand our footprint in Israel, on both coasts of the U.S., and everywhere in between. The best is yet to come.
