Seattle entrepreneur Connor Folley has teamed up with his brother Maxwell Folley to build out Alkemi, an AI platform that aims to let employees query their organization’s data in plain English — without technical skills or risk to proprietary information.
Folley previously co-founded Downstream, an Amazon advertising analytics startup acquired by Jungle Scout in 2021.
He spent two years at Jungle Scout, which offers tools for Amazon sellers, and said he saw “how the world’s most valuable knowledge remained trapped, out of reach for the frontline workers who needed it most.”
Alkemi’s technology is designed to help non-technical employees make decisions directly from company data. The company’s product, DataLab, connects directly to platforms like Snowflake, Databricks, and Looker, and can also be integrated into AI agents and apps through MCP-compatible endpoints.
The company said it aims to offer the speed and usability of tools like ChatGPT without the privacy tradeoffs that come from uploading proprietary files to public models.
DataLab does not upload or train on customer data, and its answers include traceable logic and sources.
Alkemi enters a crowded and fast-moving market. A growing wave of startups and enterprise vendors are pitching “AI copilots for data,” promising to democratize analytics while keeping information secure.
The 7-person company has raised $1.65 million in pre-seed funding, led by Tuesday Capital with participation from DNX, MGV, and other angel investors — all of whom previously backed Folley at Downstream.
Before launching Downstream in 2018, Folley was a marketing manager at Amazon. Maxwell Folley sold his last startup Caravel, a conversational intelligence platform, to Commsor.
