Catalyst, a New York-based company specializing in mobilizing customer data for enterprise growth, has announced strategic funding from Databricks Ventures, the venture capital arm of Databricks. While the exact amount of funding remains undisclosed, this marks Databricks’ first investment in the customer intelligence category, having previously supported prominent data stack players. Catalyst intends to deepen the integration between its platform and Databricks’ lakehouse, providing a seamless user experience for joint customers.
Established in 2016, Catalyst offers an SaaS platform that consolidates customer data from various sources into a unified view, empowering sales and success teams with detailed insights into customer maturity, health, and upsell potential. By leveraging Databricks’ lakehouse and AI engine, Catalyst performs analytics to identify customers ready for upsell or at risk of churn. The platform combines these insights with automation capabilities to take timely actions, such as sending targeted emails.
With this investment, Catalyst plans to strengthen its collaboration with Databricks, enabling joint customers to directly integrate their data from the Databricks lakehouse. This integration aims to streamline the user experience and maximize the value of customers’ investments in both Catalyst and Databricks. Additionally, Catalyst and Databricks are working on a new product feature called Expansion Signal, which will leverage AI-driven predictive intelligence to identify when a customer is ready to increase their spending.
CEO Edward Chiu emphasized that Catalyst is the only platform that proactively informs enterprises about the effectiveness of their playbooks in driving positive results in customer adoption or increased spending. Prior to this funding round, Catalyst had raised $65 million, with a previous public valuation of $245 million.
