The germ of an idea for what would become ThoughtSpot came to Singh when he noticed that people's ability to store data was really improving. Companies such as Aster and Hadoop (an open-source collection of software that uses networks of computers to process very large volumes of data) were starting to gain traction in the late-2000s.

On the other hand, how that data was delivered to the end users, who were often business users and not software professionals, was still very manual. One would need analysts and data experts to build dashboards, and “people had to wait weeks to get those answers,” according to Singh.