EdgeSpring

About EdgeSpring

EdgeSpring was a business intelligence and analytics startup established in 2010 by co-founders Vijay Chakravarthy and Ryan Lange. The company was situated in San Mateo, California, and secured a total of $12.7 million in funding over two rounds, with notable investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Vijay Chakravarthy, who served as CEO, was a former Salesforce executive, a background that informed the company's focus on creating user-friendly, enterprise-level solutions. This venture marked his second successful exit to Salesforce, following the sale of his presentation management startup, SlideAware, in 2008.

The firm's core business was to provide a platform that allowed decision-makers to analyze large and varied datasets without deep technical assistance from IT specialists or data analysts. EdgeSpring targeted enterprise clients, aiming to solve what its CEO described as a "massively painful" problem in the business intelligence sector. Its platform was built to handle both structured and semi-structured data, enabling users to ask complex questions and derive insights quickly. The technology featured two main components: the "EdgeMart," a data store, and the "Lens Framework," a dynamic visualization engine, which together helped clients build custom analytics applications. Some of their publicly mentioned customers included Equinix, Lithium, and Xactly.

In a significant milestone, EdgeSpring was acquired by Salesforce on June 12, 2013, for approximately $79.6 million to $134 million, just a month after emerging from stealth mode and announcing its Series A funding. The acquisition was part of Salesforce's broader strategy to bolster its analytics capabilities. The technology developed by EdgeSpring became a foundational element of what would eventually become Salesforce's Wave Analytics Cloud, later rebranded to Einstein Analytics and then CRM Analytics. This platform was designed to democratize business intelligence by providing a cloud-based, mobile-first, self-service analytics tool that could analyze data from both Salesforce and external sources.