After overhauling itself into a SaaS company, ThoughtSpot is making its India team central to its growth plans
Ajeet Singh, Cofounder, ThoughtSpot
Image: Selvaprakash Lakshmanan
One could say, ThoughtSpot made its own transition to the cloud in the nick of time. Not because there was some path-breaking technological shift—about three years ago, when the Sunnyvale, California-based data analytics company began its switch—but because the Covid pandemic happened.
When, after some initial uncertainty, businesses around the world significantly stepped up their move to the internet, ThoughtSpot had not only saved itself, but found itself in the right place at the right time, offering the right solutions.
Heading into 2023, memories of a layoff in 2020 that resulted from the shift to the cloud should be fading. With the caveat that we don’t know what more might be in store for the entire tech sector this year, which has already seen Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Salesforce together layoff about 50,000 people.
Anyway, today the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model is responsible for the bulk of ThoughtSpot’s revenue. In November 2021, Forbes reported ThoughtSpot was on track to hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue in the next 12 months, but the company declined to share financial numbers for this story. That projection, it’s worth pointing out, was also well before the current slowdown.
That said, as recently as September 2022, ThoughtSpot was clearly in growth mode, announcing a $150 million plan to expand the company’s operations in India.