We’re thrilled to announce that we are doubling down on our investment in Steep, a modern BI solution set to transform how companies utilize data across their organizations. Today we’ve co-lead their 4 million EUR seed round together with Connect Ventures.
The Modern Data Challenge
Data engineering has found itself in an exciting moment. Modern engineering practices have allowed companies to collect vastly more data — even earlier than before.
This has led to a struggle for organizations with a traditional data stack, who are desperately hiring more data scientists and analysts in an attempt to keep up with data transformation and analysis needs. This approach is unsustainable and prevents companies from fully leveraging their data assets. In a more modern approach, tools like dbt Labs provide a reliable data foundation by allowing accelerated data transformation based on the semantic framework. This is rapidly shifting the definition of the modern data stack, as dbt has grown to over 100,000 community members and 40,000 companies, doubling year-over-year.
But as much as the data stack is changing, the missing piece is still the critical “last mile” of getting data insights into the hands of end-users.
This gap represents a massive market opportunity. Business Intelligence is expected to grow to $55.5 billion by 2032, but it’s currently dominated by previous-generation products like Looker, Tableau, and Power BI that aren’t loved by users. Companies can collect data like never before, but there still isn’t a good way to make it useful to actual people. As data has become a natural part of modern work, BI also needs to change to keep up with the expectations of modern workplace tools.
Introducing Steep
We believe Steep is building the next wave of business intelligence, empowering end users to access data insights without having to rely on analysts. By building on the semantic data stack, Steep creates a unified metrics layer that serves as a single source of truth across the organization.
As Steep co-founder and CEO Johan Baltzar explains, “We saw the opportunity for BI to make a similar journey as the design field has with Figma.”
This approach fundamentally changes how companies work with data:
- End users across all levels can self-serve to answer their own questions, building shared charts and reports. Companies no longer need to hire countless analysts to enable a data-driven organization.
- The entire company can collaborate around a shared understanding of all their metrics
We believe this tool will be a part of a huge cultural shift in how fast growing companies can make decisions based on data.
Why We’re Excited
Having worked closely with the Steep team for over a year, we’ve been consistently impressed by their world-class product and design capabilities. We are very excited to increase our commitment and team up with Nino Höglund, one of Europe’s top design and product leaders, and Johan Baltzar, a stellar data and analytics leader. These founders have a clear unfair advantage, having faced firsthand the limitations of legacy BI tools in scaling analytics, during their years at Spotify, iZettle, and Kry.
Steep represents the final piece in transforming the modern data stack. By bridging the semantic layer to end users, Steep enables true data democratization while maintaining governance and consistency. The impact is already evident — read about Voi’s experience moving from Tableau to Steep, fully embracing this new way of working and rolling out Steep to hundreds of users.
We’re proud to partner with Johan Baltzar, Nino Höglund, and the entire Steep team on this journey to build a new category leader. Be part of this journey yourself by visiting their careers page!
