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Companies need product and marketing insights, but generating them is costly
Businesses across all sectors are increasingly relying on product and marketing data insights to understand customers better, improve their product development, and deliver more personalised marketing. Companies are spending over £15,000 on building data infrastructure and at least £50,000 annually on maintaining data teams. For most earlier-stage startups, these costs are prohibitive, and their product and marketing managers spend hours of their time extracting essential data insights, such as customer churn or cohort analysis, often meaning delayed mission-critical decisions. This inefficiency creates a pressing need for a streamlined, cost-effective solution.
Meet Distillery: the automated data stack for early-stage companies
Distillery’s AI-powered platform is poised to fill that gap by offering instant, actionable data insights without the need for a traditional data stack, saving businesses over £65,000 annually. Distillery’s platform is specifically designed for product and marketing managers, empowering them to access real-time data insights in seconds, through natural language queries in plain English. Distillery's competitive edge lies in replacing the traditional data stack with their proprietary AI model, providing customised data insights, leading to higher customer stickiness. Distillery aims to become an irreplaceable part of any early-stage company's core data infrastructure.
Exceptional founders with deep domain expertise
Distillery is led by co-founders Vasil Yakov (CEO) and Edward Louth (CTO), both of whom bring extensive experience in data systems and AI within the context of product and software development. Vasil has over seven years of experience as a product manager at companies like Builder AI and BlackRock, where he experienced firsthand the frustrations that come with wrangling complex and inefficient SaaS tools, databases, and spreadsheets to get the customer insights he needed. It was this experience that inspired him to found Distillery. And to build it, he teamed up with Edward, who has over eight years of experience building data systems at startups and previously co-founded Grai (YC S22), where he radically improved how data teams construct data pipelines. Together, their complementary experience and deep domain expertise makes Distillery perfectly positioned to deliver an industry-leading solution for product and marketing teams to easily access customer insights.
Antler’s investment thesis:
This is an example of us backing a team with deep domain expertise with an insight that has led them down a unique path. Our own firsthand experience of the problem they are solving makes us acutely recognise the size of the opportunity. Distillery is positioned to address a pressing need for early-stage companies, and their innovative approach offers a scalable solution to what has traditionally been a resource-heavy task. This is not just a product we can relate to but one that we, and many others, can genuinely see becoming essential in the data infrastructure landscape for startups.
Distillery’s customers who are piloting their platform are already reporting significant time savings in their data analysis processes and saving thousands of dollars in data maintenance costs. Already generating revenues within just months of launching, Distillery is on a fantastic trajectory with exciting growth opportunities ahead. Having the opportunity to use this product ourselves, it has been exciting to see how rapidly it has developed in such a short time, given the complex nature of the underlying infrastructure.
We are excited about what they have achieved in a matter of months, and what that means for the upcoming year. Their progress so far shows not only the potential for rapid growth but also their ability to deliver impactful results in real-world use cases. Distillery is a company we are incredibly proud to partner with, and we’re looking forward to the journey ahead.
