The 2021 Snowflake Startup Challenge invited early-stage startups to build innovative applications and products powered by Snowflake for the chance to win a potential investment of up to $250,000 from Snowflake, along with additional marketing opportunities. This year, hundreds of startups from over 50 countries entered the competition. The top 10 entrants competed in the semi-final round, from which three finalists were selected to compete in the Grand Finale.
Today we are excited to announce that OverlayAnalytics has been named the grand prize winner of the Snowflake Startup Challenge! Snowflake shares OverlayAnalytics’ mission to help companies make sense of any data set, from any platform, no matter the complexity, so they can make better business decisions. By leveraging repeatable, agreed-upon metrics, OverlayAnalytics automates reporting and creates streamlined dashboards that transform terabytes of data into decision-ready KPIs.
OverlayAnalytics was awarded the grand prize at Snowflake Summit after pitching its business to a panel of judges comprising Snowflake executives and representatives from top-tier VC firms. The judges were impressed by OverlayAnalytics’ business potential, product innovation, leadership team, and the way it leverages Snowflake to break down data silos and help bring near real-time data analysis to its customers.
Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Dallas, Texas, OverlayAnalytics already has 11 customers and growing revenue. (You can watch an overview of the business and its market opportunity here). The company currently has three main products:
- Rapid, which seamlessly extracts and consolidates raw, transaction-level data from disparate systems into Snowflake, where it is secure and easily accessible
- Carbon, which automates the transformation of raw, transaction-level data into digestible business logic for reporting and analysis
- Atom, which automates the reporting of financial information into meaningful visualizations.
The OverlayAnalytics executive team includes Co-Founder and CEO Bryan Shupe, COO Josh Beaver, and Data Engineering Manager Hallie Million.
“Organizations of all sizes are demanding more from their financial reporting,” Shupe explained. “OverlayAnalytics wanted to rethink financial reporting from the ground up to provide our customers with a single unified platform. By building OverlayAnalytics on Snowflake, we are able to deliver powerful reporting that our customers love from executive-level dashboards to detailed analysis along with the ability to easily share data with customers—giving our application a significant competitive advantage”
OverlayAnalytics emerged as the winner after battling Invoke Learning and Elysium Analytics in the Grand Finale pitch competition.
“Congratulations to the OverlayAnalytics team on winning Snowflake’s first Startup Challenge,” said Benoit Dageville, Co-founder and President of Products at Snowflake. “The Snowflake Data Cloud opens up a breadth of opportunities for startups to innovate and deliver disruptive solutions. We are committed to helping startups build and grow their applications on Snowflake’s platform and helping them expand their reach to more customers.”
Invoke Learning is an education-focused AI application that helps predict student performance by looking at the “whole student,” including sentiment, behaviors, and social media posts, so schools can provide proactive support to help each student stay engaged. The company aims to improve every part of the student lifecycle, from recruiting and enrollment to retention and graduation rates, and it uses Snowflake as its primary data platform.
Elysium Analytics is a security analytics platform that provides aggregated views of all activities across an enterprise. Its goal is to provide complete transparency into anomalous and suspicious behavior through the risk-based scoring of event data. Elysium Analytics uses Snowflake as its single platform for data collection and storage, making data available to customers in real time.
