An explosion in data over the last several years – both in volume and variety – has made it central to critical decision-making inside businesses everywhere. Whether you’re a technical user or a business user, data is likely a critical component of your everyday workflow, and data-driven insights fuel key decisions for all fast-moving, innovative companies.

But while there has been tremendous growth in tools for data and analytics, most of the innovation across the modern data stack has been focused on technical users who are SQL proficient, aka the data people. Business-intelligence (BI) tools were built by the data people, for the data people, and thus leave most business users in the dust. What’s more, data tools like Looker and Tableau cater to the data engineer/data analyst persona, a worker who is SQL-savvy and can operate the data warehouse. But these tools largely ignore the needs of non-technical business teams.

Every business user – from people in departments ranging from sales to marketing to finance to operations – needs data to make key decisions, but most aren’t equipped to write SQL queries to import data from their systems. As a result, they depend heavily on their data and IT teams. On the other hand, data teams have more pressing issues to attend to, but they’re often bogged down with a never-ending list of ad-hoc data requests. Business users today need to move fast and can’t afford to wait for someone to retrieve, clean, and analyze data every time they need to make a key decision.

It’s estimated that only about 12 million users are proficient in SQL, while nearly a billion people worldwide leverage spreadsheets to analyze data, build reports and publish dashboards. It’s an inside joke in the data community that the most used feature inside BI tools is the Export CSV button, which highlights that business users live inside spreadsheets. While so much has changed in the B2B SaaS landscape, spreadsheets have remained largely unchanged for decades, lacking connectivity to the systems where the data lives.

Enter Coefficient*, a no-code solution native to Google Sheets that connects with CRMs, SQL databases, BI tools and popular SaaS apps to allow business users to import and manipulate the data within spreadsheets. With the help of Coefficient, users can also build, share and automate live reports, set up alerts, and even write back enriched data to different SaaS tools.. Pretty cool, ain’t it!?

Coefficient co-founders Navneet Loiwal and Tommy Tsai are repeat founders and saw an opportunity to bring the concepts of business intelligence and data automation to business users by meeting them where they live: inside spreadsheets. In its roughly 3 years of existence, the company went from being an idea to a product with over 60,000 installs across thousands of customers. It’s worth noting all these users were acquired organically through a product-led motion (PLG). It’s a testament to the Coefficient team’s product craftsmanship that many users have become evangelists, promoting the use of the product throughout the organization. While Coefficient currently works with Google Sheets, the company plans to support Microsoft Excel soon – expanding access to millions of other spreadsheet users.

Today, we are stoked to announce that Battery is leading an $18 million Series A investment into Coefficient. We are thrilled to partner with Navneet, Tommy, and the Coefficient team to take their smart spreadsheet automation platform to the next level!

If you are a business user and want to up your data game, check out their product at https://coefficient.io/.