Tellius just raised a $16M Series B

Reston, Virginia’s Tellius builds on its major funding rounds with today’s announcement of its $16 million Series B, led by Baird Capital. Previous investors Sands Capital Ventures, Grotech Ventures and Veraz Investments also participated.

The company, which has made an AI-driven platform to help businesses make better decisions, previously raised an $8 million Series A back in the spring of 2021. Tellius has raised $33 million to date, including $9 million in seed funding.

Mark Donnelly, a partner with Baird Capital’s venture team, said that the firm’s investment in Tellius reflects the platform’s importance to a market increasingly concerned with decision intelligence — a term referring to data-driven processes that help inform what choices companies make.

“Tellius’ differentiated technology platform is well-positioned to continue its rapid growth as decision intelligence becomes more embedded across the analytics function,” said Donnelly in a statement. “Baird Capital is proud to partner with such a talented and driven management team to help them maintain their leadership position in this emerging category.”

Tellius founder and CEO Ajay Khanna told Technical.ly that the company plans to use the funds to support product development, innovation and partnerships. He said the company wants to grow both technology and service partnerships.

“We are part of this data ecosystem, and no one can function on their own,” he said. “So we’re going to focus a lot on…strengthening our current partnerships, but also growing our partnership channels.”

Khanna said the company also wants to work on its customer success side; While it already works with big enterprises, it seeks to expand within those relationships as well.

Growing this work involves hiring more employees, both in the DC area and other parts of the country as the company operates with a hybrid model. Khanna said that the company would like to increase its workforce by about 50% within the next year.

The CEO added that said decision intelligence has become a bigger topic for companies, with more of them talking about it now than they were 18 months ago. Recently, he said, more companies have been looking into what they can learn from data.

“We are positioning ourselves as a leading player in this new category of decision intelligence,” he said. “What the last 18 months have shown is that there is absolutely a massive opportunity in the market. For us, [it’s important to] continue to innovate in that, … get our customers happy, so we can continue to grow.”

Khanna said there’s also an aspect of educating the market about decision intelligence and how Tellius can be helpful. He said a lot of companies store data in the cloud, but Tellius can help them use that data to their advantage, as well as complement existing data dashboards.

“For us, the key is to be able to educate the market and say how decision intelligence can actually help them uncover those insights — and position us as a category leader in that space,” he said.