#34: Sold his tech services company to invest in big vision for his BI analytics products – Gopal Krishnamurthy

Practical Founders Podcast

Gopal Krishnamurthy was an early BI and data analytics expert working for a large company when he left to start a BI consulting company called Visual BI in 2010. Visual BI grew to over 300 employees serving enterprise customers as an evangelist to push emerging Data & Analytics trends with SAP HANA, SAP Lumira, SAP Analytics Cloud, Snowflake, DBT, and Microsoft Power BI. They also created several add-on products, which Gopal and his partner Jay retained when he sold the Visual BI consulting company in 2021 to Atos.

Gopal and Jay now lead the growing team in Lumel, the leading provider of add-on products for the massive Microsoft Power BI ecosystem which was carved out from Visual BI. Lumel gets continuous growth funding with the proceeds of the sale of the services business, but the company is on track to be profitable by end of 2023 with almost 200 employees in the US and India. Lumel products (Inforiver, ValQ, and xViz) gaining momentum and adoption from numerous large enterprises worldwide, and their paying subscribers have crossed 2,000+ organizations already.

Gopal shares his transformational story of growing from technical employee to successful consulting company CEO to now product CEO. Gopal has been a pioneer in establishing the new software category of add-on solutions to existing BI platforms. He believes that in the coming years, customers will continue to gravitate towards consolidating and maximizing their cloud and BI investments vs. buying best-of-the-breed stand-alone software.

this episode, Gopal shares:

• How he grew a fast-growing consulting services business called Visual BI by serving large companies in the US using SAP software
• Why they started to build add-on products for the SAP Business Objects ecosystem, then invested in cloud-based add-on products for Microsoft PowerBI
• How they sold their consulting business to Atos in 2021 and kept their products to start Lumel
• How they are transitioning from a portfolio of point solution products to a family of integrated solutions for large enterprises
• Why Gopal doesn’t think VC investment makes sense for Lumel even as they grow faster with marketing efforts, despite his big and bold vision that wouldn’t be a good fit for “get big fast” VCs

Find out more at practicalfounders.com.