Welcome to Snowflake’s Startup Spotlight, where we learn about awesome companies building businesses on Snowflake. In this edition, find out how Angad Singh, co-founder and CEO of Chabi, is working to give every company the chance to become data-driven with a modern data stack.
How would you explain Chabi?
Chabi is your all-in-one data stack with state-of-the-art, built-in data warehouse, ETL, data modeling and personalized analytics that are tailored to meet your unique data and BI needs. Chabi also provides an extended data team that enables companies to fully realize the value of data-driven insights without needing an in-house data team.
What prompted you to found Chabi?
The entire founding team was part of multiple direct-to-consumer startups before starting Chabi. In all of these startups we built in-house data and analytics infrastructure that helped unlock step function improvements in growth and operational efficiency throughout the business.
We knew businesses of all shapes and sizes look for — and could benefit from — an internal data stack like ours, but most businesses don’t have access to the capital, engineering and data expertise needed to build one. And frankly, a lot of businesses end up spending a lot of time and effort on standing up internal data and analytics stacks that become cost centers instead of driving growth and profitability. We knew we could bring a turnkey and highly cost-effective data stack to market that would enable a business to become data-driven with just a few clicks.
What’s the story behind your company’s name?
“Chabi” is a Hindi word that means a key. We thought that was a great fit for our company because our product unlocks all your data and becomes a personalized operating system for your business.
What do you see as Chabi’s role in today’s changing data landscape?
Businesses of all shapes and sizes have undergone a digital transformation. A direct result of that has been an order of magnitude increase in data volume and complexity that needs to be analyzed in order for a business to operate efficiently and grow. However, unless you are an enterprise-scale company, you likely don’t have access to modern data tooling and the technology resources required to implement it. Which means becoming a modern, data-driven organization remains out of reach.
We want to change that. Chabi gives every company the ability to have access to a turnkey modern stack. We’re enabling companies across the globe — like a small restaurant chain in California, a VC-backed SaaS startup in Israel or a multimillion-dollar furniture marketplace in the U.S. — to become data-driven.
How do you leverage Snowflake to help you to push the envelope in your line of business?
Snowflake is one of the foundational building blocks of Chabi. Snowflake is the core primitive that powers every feature and capability of the Chabi platform. By abstracting away the complexity of syncing and transforming data from our customers, we are able to bring the cutting-edge capabilities of Snowflake to customers who are typically not even aware of such data technologies. This includes AI and ML capabilities enabled by Snowflake that we have been able to productize for our customers by offering out-of-the-box KPI forecasts and much more.
What’s the most valuable piece of advice you got about how to run a startup?
If you are in a position to build your product with customer feedback, lean in on it heavily. There is a bad reputation around “services”-based software platforms but if adding a services component helps to get closer to the customer, it is a true win-win.
If you had a chance to go back in time and do something differently as a founder, what would you change?
There is a discipline that comes from running a bootstrapped, cash flow positive software business. If I could go back in time to my prior startups, I would raise less funding than we did and use that as a forcing function to become profitable by necessity.
If you’d like to learn more about Chabi and Angad’s founder journey, you can find Angad at the Shoptalk event in Las Vegas in March, or visit www.chabi.io. If you’re a startup building on Snowflake, check out the Powered by Snowflake Startup Program.