Standard Metrics’ portfolio monitoring platform is used by leading VC and PE firms to collect, structure, and analyze company financials, making it easier for investors to compare performance across portfolio companies.
“We’re unique in that we take a strong stance on what data matters. Companies often report the same metrics to all their investors, and those metrics can have standard definitions across firms,” said Andrew Counter, Product Manager at Standard Metrics. “That consistency is a huge differentiator, it helps our customers benchmark and compare companies apples to apples and has helped us scale quickly.”
To help customers explore those metrics, Standard Metrics experimented with custom charts, reports, and exports. However, as customers asked for greater and greater customization, developing more features for the platform began to drain time and resources. By partnering with Omni, they were able to quickly ship a fully customizable, AI-powered analytics product.
Results #
Launched a fully customizable, AI-powered analytics product in just 2.5 months, faster than the time previously spent on minor feature updates to the analytics tool
Enabled customers to build dashboards in hours, not days, replacing lengthy manual reporting cycles
Added AI-powered querying functionality, allowing non-technical users to ask portfolio questions in natural language
Freed the product & customer success teams to focus on their core work, instead of needing to build and support analytics requests
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The Challenge #
Before Omni, Standard Metrics tried different charting and reporting solutions, but customers continued to ask for more BI flexibility, including additional visualizations and granular cuts of data. Investing engineering time to build these features from scratch would have slowed time to market while pulling resources away from their core product.
In order to provide customers with the options they needed, the team evaluated embedded analytics platforms so they could focus on their core product instead of building and maintaining BI features from scratch.
The Evaluation Process #
The Standard Metrics team evaluated over 10 BI tools to find one platform that would:
Be intuitive & visually appealing for non-technical users, especially CFOs and financial analysts who are confident in Excel, and investors who expect to use AI
Include a built-in semantic model to help scale metric definitions across companies, while enabling customization when needed
Scale securely across their multi-tenant data structure, which includes a custom database schema for each customer with up to 100+ custom fields per firm
“Our users are experts in finance and investments, but they’re not data engineers. They needed something intuitive to use with the AI experience they expect, but it also had to be governed by our team, so that customers didn’t have to understand the structure behind the scenes. Omni hit the sweet spot. It felt fast and natural to use, and the semantic layer was strong.” Andrew Counter, Product Manager
The Deployment #
Within 2.5 months of selecting Omni, Standard Metrics moved from setting up their data warehouse to launching their branded Advanced Analytics offering powered by Omni to deliver the customization their data-savvy customers had been craving with unique cuts of data, easy visualization building, and dynamic dashboards.
With Omni’s dynamic schemas, they were able to easily partition customer data into separate, identical schemas and then add custom fields for each firm. This was automated and maintained at scale via Omni’s native Git integration and model API calls.
The Impact #
With their new offering, Advanced Analytics, Standard Metrics enables their customers to:
Explore their portfolio performance with drag-and-drop dashboards
Customize views by role (finance, investor relations, operations, marketing)
Schedule reports, set up alerts, and monitor anomalies
Use AI-powered natural language queries to build charts with a question
Now that customers can curate and save custom reports, they’re able to streamline their workflows and do their jobs more effectively.
“One of the customers I support used to spend several days each quarter preparing a portfolio review. With Omni, they were able to build the same dashboards in under a day, and they’ll be able to re-use them going forward.” Carter Brewer, Customer Success
The partnership has also changed how the team thinks about product development. As customers now stay in-platform to analyze their data, Standard Metrics’ team can better understand their workflows and build around them. Standard Metrics is already planning the next phase of analytics.
“Omni lets us move fast, support a range of customer needs, and focus on what makes Standard Metrics unique. ”John Melas-Kyriazi, CEO