In a bid to transform corporate decision-making into a data-driven endeavor, engineers Mark Hay and Ethan Ding have founded TextQL, an innovative platform aiming to connect a company's existing data infrastructure with advanced language models akin to OpenAI's ChatGPT and GPT-4. Despite the inherent ambition, the co-founders, who crossed paths during the pandemic, exude optimism in their pursuit of providing business teams with on-demand data querying capabilities.Mark Hay, serving as TextQL's CTO and a former engineer on Facebook's machine learning team, asserts that data leaders have long been misled by a false promise, with chief data officers facing challenges related to the perceived pitfalls of "self-service."

Hay points out that data scientists spend a significant portion of their time fulfilling one-off data requests, leading to lost productivity and disputes over semantic nuances. TextQL aims to offer a solution to this issue by employing a data model that maps a company's database to business-specific "nouns," ensuring a seamless understanding of terms across diverse teams.Launched in 2022, TextQL utilizes its data model to facilitate users in posing queries to a chatbot, thus simplifying complex requests like identifying late orders or calculating distribution center concentrations.

The platform also integrates with business intelligence tools, referencing existing dashboards and documentation from enterprise data catalogs. Mark Hay envisions TextQL as a formidable competitor against established vendors like Palantir and C3.ai. Presently serving clients in healthcare, bio and life sciences, financial services, manufacturing, and media, TextQL boasts an annual recurring revenue in the six figures, providing a promising outlook for future growth. Backed by a recent funding round of $4.1 million, co-led by Neo and DCM, TextQL looks set to redefine how enterprises leverage data for decision-making.