Smartbi

Established in 2011, Guangzhou Smartbi Software Co., Ltd., operating as Smartbi, has carved out a niche in China's business intelligence (BI) and big data analytics sector. The company originated from the former BI firm, Fionet Software, which was acquired and later delisted. Wu Huafu, who served in a research and development role at the parent company, founded Smartbi with a team of around 20 individuals. The firm is dedicated to providing enterprise clients with a one-stop-shop for BI solutions, focusing on mining the value of customer data.

Smartbi's business model is centered on the development and provision of its enterprise-level BI application platform, also named “Smartbi”. This platform caters to a wide array of clients across industries like finance, government, manufacturing, retail, and real estate. Its clientele includes major names such as Huawei, Alibaba, Bank of China, and VIVO. The company has demonstrated significant penetration in the financial sector, covering a majority of the top domestic banks and securities firms in China. Since 2020, Smartbi has expanded its focus from large corporations to include small and medium-sized enterprises, necessitating a standardization of its products, sales, and delivery processes.

The core offering is a comprehensive BI platform that integrates traditional, self-service, and intelligent BI functionalities to address diverse data analysis needs. The platform provides a full suite of tools for data connection, preparation, analysis, and application. Key features include complex reporting, data visualization, self-service dashboards, exploratory analysis, and visual ETL (Extract, Transform, Load). A notable feature is its Excel Fusion Analysis, which allows business users to perform self-service analysis directly within the familiar Excel interface. For more advanced requirements, Smartbi incorporates machine learning modeling, predictive analysis, and natural language analysis, which allows users to ask business questions in natural language to query data. The platform is designed to be scalable, supporting distributed computing and a variety of computational models. Since its inception, the company has secured significant funding, raising a total of $146 million over four rounds from investors including FG Venture, Gaocheng Capital, and MiningLamp.

Keywords: business intelligence, big data analytics, data visualization, enterprise software, self-service analytics, predictive analytics, data mining, financial technology, reporting tools, data preparation, ETL, machine learning, natural language processing, data dashboards, China, enterprise reporting, data analysis, decision support, BI platform, data management