Bloomberg BusinessWeek Radio Interview
Tim Stenovec Reltio is a venture capital-backed, powered data platform that counts companies, including Pfizer, Neiman Marcus, CarMax, Petco, Warner Brothers, Discovery, and more as clients we’ve got with us Manish. So founder, chairman and CEO of Reltio joining us from Redwood City, California. Manish. It’s a private company with backers including Sapphire Ventures, crosslink Capital, and more The valuation of the last round around $1.7 billion.
I think it’s fair to say customers who are use products from Neiman Marcus or CarMax or Petco and they don’t see what Reltio does behind the scenes. So explain to us how you analyze a company’s data and what it can do for them.
Manish Sood, Tim, thanks for having me on the show. Um, Reltio is focused on unifying data from across multiple sources. Reltio If you think about the current state of the enterprise. They have hundreds of different applications that are being used at any given point in time today, and it’s become really difficult for these organizations to figure out if they have the right information about their customers, products, suppliers asset locations, these things that are critical to running their business operations.
And that’s where Reltio comes in, where we take in information from all these. Contributing sources, existing applications, and legacy infrastructure create a unified view of the information that your business runs on, and provide that for faster decisions, easier ways to engage with the end audience that you’re working with.
Which results in for these companies for. Faster growth better compliance and security, and as well as making sure that they’re optimizing the cost footprint, especially in the world of this massive sprawl of data that they’re starting to see.
Tim Stenovec: Manish, it does seem like a pretty crowded market.
Informatica comes to mind given the news that we got this week about the Salesforce acquisition. Prophecy is also. Another company that seems to me like it is in your space. How do you differentiate yourself from competitors?
Manish Sood: Reltio from the very beginning has been focused on the real time data intelligence that we can provide. And this means providing the intelligence in milliseconds orientation. Especially because our belief from the very beginning has been that this kind of data about customer, product supplier needs to be used as the, at the point of engagement, to influence the experience that you’re delivering as an organization.
And that’s where speed matters. And one of the key differentiators for us is to be able to do this at speed with scale. For customers who are managing billions of profiles all the way to customers who are managing very complex orientation of data inside their own businesses and being able to do it with a faster speed rate and pace and.
From the very beginning, we have been cloud-native built for AI consumption and optimizing the business processes further.
Carol Massar: So on a day where we’re all obsessed with NVIDIA’s earnings and the day after and what it says about the AI race it seems like people are up upbeat. We know the hyperscalers that are the bulk of NVIDIA’s business, be it Microsoft and Meta and some others. What’s your narrative from your vantage point, your perspective? What’s the narrative you have around AI and the ramp up?
Manish Sood: Look, a AI is a fundamentally different building block compared to everything else that has existed so far in the enterprise technology stack. And what this building block allows us to do is to re-envision how some of these applications will be re-imagined. How this will lead to an entire transformation in the enterprise tech stack. But the key ingredients for that transformation to take place is going to be the data, the strategic asset that we keep talking about, especially in the enterprise context. This is the data. When you think about it, that informs the AI’s ability to deliver faster outcomes.
And this is where the AI capabilities that we are all, so excited about. They are infrastructure providers, Nvidia, all the cloud hyperscalers. But now is the time to start building the new version of the enterprise with the combination of data and AI, and that’s really exciting overall for the entire industry.
Carol Massar: I love when we talk with someone like you because you guys work with companies like L’Oreal, Pfizer, or HP, CarMax and so many more. So when L’Oreal comes to you, what are you doing for them specifically? Or CarMax comes to you, what are you doing for them specifically?
Manish Sood: Let’s take CarMax as an example. When you think about their business, think about the data that is most critical for them to be able to buy cars, sell cars, service them, engage with you as a customer. They are trying to understand across all the different ways of engagement that they have, how they can provide the right quote at the right point in time or the right offer. When you are ready to buy a car and do all of this with the guarantee that you can be done with the entire kind car buying or car selling experience in less than 15 minutes without the need to haggle. In order to deliver that kind of an experience, they need to have each one of their business processes., every application that they use to be informed with the right data about the consumers that they’re working with, as well as the vehicles that they’re transacting on. And that is how, by bringing all the information together from all the disparate sources, both first party and third party sources that they procure information from.
They’re trying to assemble a unified 360 degree view of not just the customer that they’re working with but also vehicle, all the vehicles that exist in the US because that is the capability that allows them to inform their split second decisions on how they will price a vehicle or how they will want to engage with you in the best manner possible to create the optimal experience.
And all of this data about the vehicle and the customers is being managed inside ku. It is informing, okay. Every decision. In millisecond,
Tim Stenovec: Manish. Gotta leave it there. Manish Sood, founder, chairman, and CEO of Reltio joining us from Redwood City, California. Manish, you gotta come back. Keep us updated.