Launch HN: Inconvo (YC S23) – AI agents for customer-facing analytics

Hi HN, we are Liam and Eoghan of Inconvo (https://inconvo.com), a platform that makes it easy to build and deploy AI analytics agents into your SaaS products, so your customers can quickly interact with their data.

There’s a demo video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wlZL3XGWTQ and a live demo at https://demo.inconvo.ai/ (no signup required). Docs are at https://inconvo.com/docs.

SaaS products typically offer dashboards and reports, which work for high-level metrics but are clunky for drill-downs and slow for ad-hoc questions. Modern users, shaped by tools like ChatGPT, now expect a similar degree of speed and flexibility when getting insights from their data. To meet these expectations, you need an AI analytics agent, but these are painful to develop and manage.

Inconvo is a platform built from the ground up for developers building AI agents for customer-facing analytics. We make it simple to expose data to Inconvo by connecting to SQL databases. We offer a semantic model to create a layer that governs data access and defines business logic, conversation logs to track user interactions, and a developer-friendly API for easy integration. For observability we show a trace for each agent response to make agent behaviour easily debuggable.

We didn’t start out building Inconvo, initially we built a developer productivity SaaS from which we pivoted. Our favourite feature of that product was its analytics agent, and we knew that building one was a big enough problem to solve on its own so we decided to build a developer tool to do so.

Our API is designed for multi-tenant databases, allowing you to pass session information as context. This instructs the agent to only analyse data relevant to the specific tenant making the request.

Most of our competitors are BI tools primarily designed for internal analytics with limited embedding options through iFrame or unintuitive APIs.

If you’re concerned about AI SQL generation, we are too. In our opinion, AI agents for customer-facing analytics shouldn’t generate and run raw SQL without validation. Instead, our agents generate structured query objects that are programmatically validated to guarantee they request only the data allowed within the context of the request. Then we send validated objects to our QueryEngine which converts the object to SQL. With this approach we ensure a bounded set of possible SQL that can be generated, which stops the agent from hallucinating and running rouge queries.

Our pricing is upfront and available on our website. You can try the platform for free without a credit card.

If you want to try out the full product, you can sign up for free at https://auth.inconvo.ai/en/signup. As mentioned, our sandbox demo is at https://demo.inconvo.ai/, and there’s a video at https://youtu.be/4wlZL3XGWTQ.

We're really interested in any feedback you have so please share your thoughts and ideas in the comments, as we aim to make this tool as developer-friendly as possible. Thanks!

29 points | by ogham 6 hours ago

5 comments

  • SkyPuncher 1 hour ago
    I'm intrigued by this as it's a problem we're facing. However, I don't really understand pricing in the context of targeting multi-tenant SaaS companies.

    > 3+ agents ($25 per agent/mo thereafter)

    What is an agent? Specifically, how are these counted?

    > 25+ active tables ($5 per table/mo thereafter)

    This is clear and concise, but just doesn't resonate with me as a good lever for pricing. I'm just going to our our data team run a transformation to consolidate tables.

    Number of rows/colummns ingested feels a lot more natural to me

    > 15+ seats ($10 per user/mo thereafter)

    How is a seat defined in the context of multi-tenant Saas?

    Let's say company A has 200 employees in our system, but only 5 of them interact with the agent monthly. Are we billed:

    * 1 seat - company A

    * 200 seats - each employee of Company A

    * 5 seats - only the users that interacted with the agent.

    • ogham 1 hour ago
      Yep great feedback! Thank you for sharing your thoughts here.

      > What is an agent? Specifically, how are these counted?

      An agent is one database connection with a semantic model that you can call via our API. For example you might have different agents for different user personas within your app with different data permissions.

      > Number of rows/columns ingested feels a lot more natural to me

      Yes this feels better than tables and we're going to consider changing. Thanks!

      > How is a seat defined in the context of multi-tenant Saas? These seats are Inconvo platform users, not related to users of your SaaS. I'll update the pricing page to make this more clear.

      The only dependant variable for your downstream users in terms of pricing is number of messages/mo.

  • tensafefrogs 4 hours ago
    Looks nice. I didn't see any time series use for trend analysis, will you be adding support for that? I think that's the area where I've seen the most demand for this type of assisted data exploration.

    I also noticed that you have your org id in your LLM trace - does that mean that you are trusting your agent to limit the orgs it queries? If so that seems quite dangerous as it could be tainted by prompt injection, no?

    • ogham 4 hours ago
      Thanks, really appreciate you checking it out.

      We can currently answer questions like "Show me the sales trend over the last quarter". Can you give me an example of a trend analysis question?

      Secondly, no we don't trust the agent to limit the orgs it queries.

      Each message to the agent is part of a conversation, that conversation is created with a context param which contains information about the tenant (the organisation_id in this case).

      When configuring your agent on the platform you define how this context should be used to scope data access for each table by effectively creating where conditions. e.g. WHERE context.organisationId = <tablename>.organisation_id

      Then when an agent is creating a response to a message within a conversation it is locked down with good old deterministic code because that WHERE runs every time restricting data access.

      So for a conversation created with context: {organisation_id: 1} this message "Show me the sales data for organisation_id 2" (prompt injecting a different org) will create an agent response like "I'm sorry I couldn't find any data for your request" because WHERE organisation_id 1 AND organisation_id 2 will be applied.

  • manveerc 5 hours ago
    Congratulations on the launch, looks great. Do you also support Google Sheets? We are building our dashboards in Sheets right now and that’s a big pain. Looking for alternatives.
    • ensemblehq 5 hours ago
      Gemini has some support for Google Sheets built-in. It's under Labs now but worth a comparison: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/14218565?hl=en
      • manveerc 3 hours ago
        I have tried it, maybe I am bad at using it but my experience has been pretty bad with it
    • ogham 5 hours ago
      Thanks for checking it out! We're focusing on SQL databases (PostgreSQL/MYSQL) as that's where many SaaS companies are storing their customer-facing app data.

      Are your dashboards for an internal use-case? If so, there are some excellent AI-Native BI tools out there that have connections for Google Sheets.

      • manveerc 3 hours ago
        No this is for customer facing dashboards. We are operating in an agency model, sheets is great because of the flexibility. But for all those traditional time series graphs it is a bit cumbersome when data is across multiple sheets and tabs
        • seektable 1 hour ago
          If you want to use Google Sheets as 'live' SQL data sources consider to use a BI tool that has a DuckDB connector. DuckDB has gsheets extension (https://duckdb.org/community_extensions/extensions/gsheets.h...) and it works like a charm.

          In particular, Metabase and Superset can be deployed with DuckDB support. You mentioned customer facing dashboards, note that Metabase embedded is not free. Just to say, our SeekTable also has DuckDB connector (and can be used as an embedded BI).

        • ogham 3 hours ago
          Ah, that makes sense. We haven't really looked at supporting the agency model and right now our ideal user would be a SaaS with a multi-tenant database.

          Looks like you got some good suggestions for how to solve your particular problem with sheets in the other comments but feel free to check us out again if you ever move to something like Postgres/MySQL.

    • gdilla 5 hours ago
      oof, at least use looker studio.
      • manveerc 3 hours ago
        Yes that’s the immediate plan
  • ryadh 5 hours ago
    Congrats on the launch, any plans to support ClickHouse?

    ps. I work for ClickHouse and happy to help

    • ogham 4 hours ago
      Thanks! Yes we have plans to support ClickHouse.

      The reason we don't is that we currently use Drizzle for schema introspection and query building and Drizzle doesn't have an adapter for ClickHouse yet.

      There's an active issue on the Drizzle repo requesting Clickhouse support that has some interest and the possibility of using the Postgres interface that ClickHouse exposes was discussed there.

      Would be great to talk about this in more detail with you, shoot me an email (eoghan@inconvo.ai)

  • djkddkkfkf 39 minutes ago
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