Our Investment in Zing Data

Most workstreams in the enterprise used to be single-player mode: building models in a spreadsheet, designing presentations, mocking up websites, supply chain management. For the first 25 years of business software, this paradigm was the norm, and the only collaborative experience, at scale, was transmitting and storing static files.

This began to change in the early 2000s, with the launch of S3 and EC2, Salesforce.com, and the incredible expansion of GMail, which led to the first true durable competitor to Microsoft Office, GSuite. Single-player business software began to cede territory to multiplayer, desktop software ceded to cloud. Imagine having to send .xls, .pdf, .doc files every time you wanted to work together with a colleague on a workstream today? The world transformed.

Since then, services have virtualized, have become lighter-weight, and infrastructure from the distributed systems world has allowed virtual editors to feel immediate, run in client-server models, and be legible across organizations. Figma is the best example of this success.

Meanwhile, data warehouses have also virtualized and more modular, giving way to the “Data cloud”. Today, you can access your companies data via unified cloud storage and analytics services, and business intelligence products have sprung up allowing users to transform, analyze, and share their data, and all they need to know is a little SQL…. What percentage of your org “knows a little SQL”? And how many of those who don’t are reliant on the BI team, or the data science team, to access that data cloud? And how important is that data for the marketers, the salespeople, the product leaders on a daily basis? Enter Zing.

Zack and Sabin, who met at M.I.T. 10 years ago, and have worked across enterprise and consumer software as product and engineering leaders. They came together to build a system that skates where the puck is going. Over 90% of workers today use their smartphone at work. I use it to look at excel files, write emails, comment on presentations, on conference calls. The form factor is getting simpler, the tools lighter. Zing pushes this even further by allowing you to access your company data cloud directly in a mobile-first environment. With natural language, without a need to conduct any transformations, from your mobile device, you can access any of your data warehouses or cloud data sources, transform and analyze it, pull and share reports with your colleagues. And you don’t need to know any SQL. Everyone in the org can use it.

Abstractions toward natural language, toward simplicity, toward visual interfaces, happen across business software. Data has made incredible strides in this arena, but still lags other areas. Data accessibility will serve as a core competitive advantage for digitally native companies in the next decade. We believe Zing is poised to lead that movement, and were thrilled to partner with them in their first round of institutional financing.

Of course, they are hiring.