Powering Customer-Led Growth: Databricks Ventures Invests in Catalyst

Databricks Ventures is excited to announce our investment in Catalyst, an advanced platform that helps software companies accelerate growth by optimizing relationships with their existing customers. Catalyst is at the forefront of evangelizing the “customer-led growth” methodology, which enables businesses to efficiently maximize the lifetime value of their most critical recurring revenue asset: existing customers. Catalyst provides extensive integrations and intelligence that make sophisticated customer-led growth accessible to organizations across industries and sizes. It is already used by leading software businesses such as Grammarly and Fivetran.

Catalyst also represents Databricks Ventures’ first investment in a company whose core product is built on top of Databricks. Catalyst has recently doubled down on Databricks as its core data and AI platform because of the power and flexibility that the Databricks Lakehouse provides.

How Catalyst Is Transforming Customer Growth

Catalyst’s cloud-based platform helps software companies grow revenue with advanced insights and workflows that strengthen customer adoption, retention, expansion and advocacy. Catalyst integrates with multiple platforms across the customer lifecycle, including CRM (Salesforce), event analytics (Mixpanel) and support (Zendesk) to unify mission-critical customer data into a single place, delivered through an intuitive UI built for post-sale teams.

Catalyst empowers teams to identify customer trends, share information across platforms, automate customer value creation and optimize efforts that increase revenue from customers. This can translate into lower acquisition costs, increased renewal efficiency, stronger risk mitigation and customer expansion growth. As a result, Catalyst has been recognized by G2 as an industry leader for time to value and ROI.

How Databricks Helps

Databricks is the data and AI engine behind Catalyst’s consumer-facing application, helping them deliver scalable, real-time analytics to its customers with minimal configuration. The Databricks Lakehouse is the primary engine for collecting and processing data from the third-party customer lifecycle applications used by Catalyst’s end customers. Once that data is captured in Lakehouse, Catalyst leverages our AI and machine learning capabilities to deliver its users real-time access to data from multiple sources, empowering them to make informed decisions based on the latest information available. The power and scalability offered by Databricks make it the platform of choice for the Catalyst engineering team: Catalyst requires real-time analytics that can't be delivered by alternative platforms. And Databricks enables Catalyst to unify data from various sources for real-time analytics to power their end user application.

What’s Next

We have talked before about why so many startups delivering modern, data-driven applications are built on top of the Databricks Lakehouse. Together with this investment, Catalyst is also announcing a deeper integration with Databricks, so customers can integrate directly with the data stored in their own Databricks Lakehouse deployment. This integration simplifies the user experience and enables customers to get more value from their existing investments in Catalyst and Databricks.

With this investment, we are proud to support a customer and partner who is delivering a differentiated product thanks to the power of data, analytics and AI. We look forward to deepening our partnership and helping Catalyst continue to deliver a market-leading product offering as it helps lead the customer-led growth revolution.