Data & analytics (2024)

If we think of data as a synonym for information, then every tech company is now a data company, regardless of the market they’re in. Every business is a data discovery engine for its own market, and the more (good) data they use, the faster they’ll get to know their market and eventually beat it. But not every company can become a data business on their own — they need help and that’s where specialised players make money.

Data & analytics (D&A) startups can operate anywhere across the data ops lifecycle: gathering, structuring, storing, sharing, protecting, all the way to deployment. Some startups focus on a few of these functions, but most are deliberately sector-based and offer versatile platforms to meet as many needs as possible.

There are two key service groups: those that help companies manage data ops (the D in D&A), and those that help make sense of it (the A). Since the two can be codependent, mixed services are common for most use cases. For example, a D&A e-commerce company will take care of backend processes (such as data processes for orders and clients) as well as the insight layer — or data-based answers that a costly analyst would otherwise tackle.

Others still target legacy data systems with SaaS low-or-no-code alternatives for non-data teams — a separate user base from developer tools. That’s the case for collaborative workspaces, spreadsheet alternatives, business reporting tools and task automation apps, among others, which require little data literacy — until AI will do it for (or with ) them.

If D&A is approaching maturity, the state of the market is the closest preview of how AI may impact the next generation of businesses (where once there were data companies, soon there will be AI-powered operations). We’re not there yet, but the faster D&A companies get to product-market fit, the smoother the path to AI adoption will be — and the fewer mistakes will occur in the process. Conversational data-to-insights AI tools are a leading example of that.

The US market is more developed. Europe lacks the infrastructure giants/legacy tech firms and its startups are still mostly working on the application layer — which is fine but far from plans of sovereignty. Add regulation to the mix and Europe increasingly looks more like a large consumer market than a provider’s haven.