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

36 points by ogham 19 hours ago

23 comments

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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!

Mceach 2 minutes ago

Great launch—this is a neat solution for embedding AI-powered analytics into multi-tenant SaaS products!

A couple of thoughts/questions that came to mind:

Time series and trend analysis: You mentioned support for queries like “Show me the sales trend over the last quarter.” Have you considered enabling more complex trend detection, such as anomaly spotting (e.g. “flag any week where sales dropped >15% vs previous week”) or seasonality adjustments (comparing YoY trends)? I think these kinds of features could greatly enhance the exploratory experience for non-technical users.

Control and validation of generated queries: The semantic-layer + WHERE clause strategy sounds very robust—it’s reassuring to see this deterministic guard against prompt injections or tenant leaks. Out of curiosity, do you provide tooling to audit or review agent-generated query objects before they run, especially for initially onboarding new clients? That kind of transparency could boost confidence in more security-conscious customers.

Overall, love the direction—AI-powered analytics agents have a ton of potential. Looking forward to seeing how this evolves!

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tensafefrogs 17 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?

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  • ogham 16 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.

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SkyPuncher 14 hours 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.

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  • ogham 14 hours 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.

    Reply View 1 reply
throw03172019 10 hours ago

Is it purely chat based (ad-hoc) or users can make dashboard like “cards” for common queries they have? (Imagine the stripe dashboard MRR, today’s revenue, failed charges, etc)

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  • ogham 10 hours ago

    Purely chat based for now, though it has crossed our mind that replaying our generated queries might be useful.

    We haven't figured out what form that might take yet.

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trutz 12 hours ago

Congrats on your launch! I see you are using Recharts in your demo to show some nice charts after / withing the chat responses which is very nice.

Does the backend only create the chart data and the chart itself is rendered in the frontend? Or put differently: Can you use any chart library to render this data? Do you support multiple chart types?

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  • ogham 12 hours ago

    Thank you for taking the time to check it out!

    Yes we just create the chart data, the front end is responsible for rendering and can choose the library.

    We will respond with a consistent chart object (https://inconvo.com/docs/api-reference/conversations/respons...) that can then be transformed with your own code to fit the spec of the frontend chart library.

    We support line and bar at the moment planning to add more types soon. Also working on multi-series for those chart types.

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manveerc 18 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.

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  • mritchie712 12 hours ago

    We[0] support Google Sheets as a source out of the box[1]. We have connectors for 500 sources and can grab data from anything with an API.

    Definite spins up a datalake for you and pipelines to get data into the lake. We also have BI (semantic layer + dashboards) and an AI agent that will build reports for you. Let me know if you need a hand getting set up! I'm mike@definite.app.

    0 - https://www.definite.app/

    1 - https://docs.definite.app/extractors/gsheetquerying

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  • ogham 18 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.

    Reply View 3 replies
    • manveerc 16 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

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      • seektable 13 hours 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).

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      • ogham 16 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.

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ryadh 17 hours ago

Congrats on the launch, any plans to support ClickHouse?

ps. I work for ClickHouse and happy to help

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  • ogham 17 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)

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