San Francisco, CA – February 12, 2024 – Motif Analytics, a pioneering data analytics startup, today announced its emergence from private beta with selected partners to provide general availability to its analytics tool. This launch comes on the heels of a $5.7 million seed funding round led by Amplify Partners and Felicis, with participation from the InvestInData angel group.
Motif was founded at the end of 2021 by Mikhail Panko, CEO, and Theron Ji, CTO. The duo met at Google where they developed a predecessor to Motif, which became widely used across the company. Several months into 2022, Sean Taylor joined Motif as Chief Scientist. Sean is well known in the tech community for co-authoring a popular forecasting package Prophet and for his deep expertise in causal inference. Cumulatively the founders bring over three decades of experience building data and analytics tools at top Silicon Valley companies.
Growth and operations teams are in continuous search of levers for improving key metrics and optimizing business processes and want to leverage quantitative company data rather than relying on qualitative anecdotes and hunches. Today they have to choose between asking data teams to run statistically rigorous but slow deep dives or self-serving using product analytics tools, which often result in misinterpreting imperfect data and chasing spurious correlations.
“I haven't met a Head of Growth or Operations who was happy about their team’s ability to use company data in everyday decision-making,” said Mikhail. “They try and get disillusioned with self-serve analytics tools, which promise one-click solutions and trivialize the complexity of cleaning, modeling and interpreting data. There is a reason why data teams don’t want to touch them. I’ve observed many companies who can’t point to any meaningful wins from expensive product analytics tools they bought.”
Analytics tools used by data teams provide more expressivity and fine-grained control for working with data but they were built for standardized reporting, lag behind on interactivity and don’t support efficient collaboration between analytics and business domain experts for exploratory questions.
Motif re-imagines analytics from the ground up with the goal of providing the fastest statistically rigorous path from raw data to practical insights in modern tech companies. The key insight is that practical business questions are not about computing metrics but rather about identifying growth and optimization levers, which is better served using sequence analytics for working naturally with user and business event flows.
Motif is built on 5 key innovations, which come together to speed up exploratory analysis:
- Rich interactive sequence visualizations for identifying patterns in user and business flows
- Small but expressive set of sequence operations to query flow data the way analysts think – most practical queries take less than 10 lines of code
- Incremental query engine to seamlessly trade between query precision, speed and cost according to analyst’s needs
- AI for identifying conversion predictors in event sequences using neural network models behind breakthrough LLM products like ChatGPT (adapted to model sequences of events instead of words)
- In-browser local mode to experience Motif capabilities on proprietary data instantly without setup, data prep or data sharing.
“Flow-based questions are everywhere in data-driven tech companies: interpreting experiment results, measuring attribution, optimizing user funnels, detecting fraud, etc.,” said Alex Deng, Principal Data Scientist at Airbnb and an early adopter of Motif. “SQL and existing data tools were not built for analyzing sequences and don’t quite work despite everybody trying to shoehorn them in. Motif has reimagined analytics for sequence questions from the ground up. I’ve never seen anything providing such a natural and powerful way to query, visualize and model event sequences to drive practical business decisions. I am especially excited about Motif's novel AI approach to analytics bringing LLMs to event sequences.”
Motif was selected by InvestInData, a collective of over 50 data executives from a variety of cutting-edge tech companies such as DoorDash, Netflix, PayPal, Pinterest and Shopify, which picks a small number of most promising data startups each year to invest in. Joining the InvestInData portfolio provides Motif with a stamp of approval for its unique approach and access to unparalleled expertise of industry leaders with a birds-eye view of their data organizations.
Azadeh Moghtaderi, InvestInData investor and VP of Data at Coursera, praised Motif’s approach: “Throughout my career in data, I have worked with and evaluated numerous analytics tools. Few made me as excited as Motif did. Relying on their deep expertise with analytics in tech companies, the founders have reimagined a new powerful set of data abstractions and tradeoffs for an analytics tool, which respect the importance of statistical soundness but bring analysis much closer to the practical needs of business stakeholders. After seeing Motif in action, I had to be a part of this revolution.”
Viviana Faga, General Partner at Felicis, is excited about Motif’s position in the market: “As a tech marketing executive and investor, I have observed firsthand how the analytics space has become overcrowded with similar-sounding products, which always overpromise and underdeliver. Motif's fresh and differentiated approach uses sequence analytics and has a unique way to apply AI to analytics data. Most companies struggle with complex data stacks and mountains of effort to deliver practical insights for everyday business decisions—now with Motif there’s an easy-to-use solution that will reinvent how tech companies use their data.”
For more information on how Motif Analytics is shaping the future of data analysis, visit motifanalytics.com.
About Motif
Motif Analytics is an analytics product tailored to answer complex business questions through analyzing event sequences. It goes beyond traditional reporting (what is happening to the key business metrics?) and instead focuses on root-causing (why are metrics moving?) and guiding (how can the metrics be moved in the right direction?). Motif solves this by providing an interactive data wrangling, visualization and exploration experience to find insights in event sequences – “motifs”. This approach has been proven at Google and Uber, and is ripe for bringing to the wider data ecosystem. Learn more at motifanalytics.com.
About Amplify Partners
Amplify Partners is an early-stage venture capital firm focused on AI, developer tools, data, and cybersecurity. With a decade-long track record of partnering with technical founders, Amplify has been the first investor in over 100 companies, including dbt Labs, Datadog, Fastly, Hex, Runway, SiMa.ai, Temporal, and more. Through its Build Team, Amplify collaborates with founders to establish connections with early customers, achieve product-market fit, and attract top talent. The firm is headquartered in Menlo Park and San Francisco, California. Discover more about Amplify at amplifypartners.com.
About Felicis
Founded in 2006, Felicis is a venture capital firm investing in companies reinventing core markets, as well as those creating frontier technologies. The firm was the first to offer a Founder Development pledge, providing needed resources to help founders scale themselves. Felicis focuses on early-stage investments and currently manages over $3B in capital across nine funds. The firm is an early backer of more than 49 companies valued at $1B+. More than 100 of its portfolio companies have been acquired or gone public, including Adyen, Credit Karma, Cruise, Fitbit, Guardant Health, Meraki, Ring, and Shopify. The firm is based in Menlo Park and San Francisco in California. Learn more at felicis.com.
About InvestInData
InvestInData is an angel syndicate made up of over 50 data executives from companies like DoorDash, Netflix, PayPal, Pinterest, and Shopify. The group leverages their collective experience to fund and advise early-stage data companies, solving problems they experience day to day. Learn more at investindata.ai.