Most businesses are not short on data.
In fact, they are surrounded by it. Orders, inventory, customers, revenue, operations, performance. All of it lives inside one or more custom databases that quietly power the business every day.
And yet, when someone needs an answer, things still slow down.
Not because the data is missing. Not because teams are careless. But because access to that data is still shaped by workflows that were never designed for everyday business questions.
That gap is what led us to build Teela.
The problem teams keep running into
Most medium and larger businesses rely on custom databases. That is usually a strength. Those systems reflect how the business actually operates, not how an off-the-shelf tool expects it to.
The issue is access.
Getting answers out of those databases almost always requires technical knowledge that most employees do not have. When questions come up in operations, finance, product, or analytics, the path to an answer usually looks the same. A request is written. A ticket is submitted. The question lands with an IT or data team that is already balancing infrastructure work, bugs, and higher-priority requests.
The wait begins.
Answers come back days later. Sometimes weeks later. By the time they arrive, the conversation has moved on, decisions have already been made, or the opportunity to act has passed.
So teams adapt. They reuse spreadsheets that are close enough. They rely on exports that already exist. They stop asking follow-up questions because restarting the process feels like too much friction.
None of this happens because teams do not care about accuracy. It happens because the system quietly teaches them to move on without it.
Why this problem never really goes away
On paper, BI tools are supposed to solve this.
In reality, most of them depend on a fragile assumption: that the right questions are already known ahead of time.
Dashboards work well when the business is stable and the questions do not change. Real teams do not operate that way. Questions evolve mid-meeting. Someone wants a different breakdown. Another variable suddenly matters.
When that happens, everything slows down again. New dashboards need to be built. Queries need to be rewritten. Someone has to translate business intent into SQL. The ticket queue fills back up.
Some organizations try to solve this by teaching more people SQL. That can help in small pockets, but it rarely scales. Business users still have to think like databases. Data teams still have to review and fix queries. The bottleneck just shifts.
What teams actually need is not another tool layered on top of the problem. They need a different way of interacting with their data altogether.
The Teela solution
Teela was built to remove the ticket queue from everyday data questions.
Instead of forcing teams to wait, Teela lets people ask questions in plain English and get answers in seconds rather than days. The questions are not pre-defined. The answers are not approximations. They come directly from the database the business already relies on.
That changes the rhythm of work.
Business users get answers while context still matters. Decisions happen faster because information shows up in the moment it is needed. IT and data teams spend less time managing queues and more time working on the systems themselves.
Teela does not open the door to chaos. It opens the door to access, without sacrificing trust.
How Teela works
Teela connects directly to your existing SQL database in a strictly read-only configuration. It never writes data back. It never modifies records. It cannot change the system it connects to.
When Teela connects, it automatically learns your database schema. It understands how tables relate to one another and how data is structured across systems.
Just as importantly, it learns how your company talks about its data.
The language used in meetings. The terms teams use for customers, products, time periods, and workflows. That company-specific vocabulary is what allows Teela to understand real questions, not just generic prompts.
When someone asks a question in plain English, Teela’s query engine translates that intent into SQL behind the scenes. The query stays grounded in the database, which eliminates hallucination risk and keeps answers traceable.
Results are returned as tables, charts, or summaries, depending on the question. There is no separate reporting layer to maintain and no second set of numbers to reconcile. The answer you see is tied directly to the source your technical teams already trust.
Over time, questions stop feeling like interruptions. They become part of how work gets done.
What makes Teela different
Teela is not trying to impress you with cleverness. It is designed to earn trust.
Because it automatically learns your schema, pilot customers see up to 75 percent of questions answered without additional training. There is no long setup phase and no heavy modeling work before value shows up.
Because it learns company-specific language, Teela adapts to how your business actually speaks instead of forcing teams to adapt to the tool. It works across industries because it is grounded in your data, not assumptions.
And because it stays anchored in SQL, every answer can be traced back to the underlying query. There is no black box and no mystery math.
That grounding is what allows Teela to move quickly without breaking trust.
Core capabilities that support real workflows
Teela supports the databases teams already use, including SQL Server, Postgres, and MySQL. Natural-language questions are translated into SQL that stays reliable and transparent.
Dashboards update automatically. Alerts notify teams when thresholds change. Scheduled reports keep everyone informed without manual exports or repeated requests.
But the real shift happens when questions stop being one-offs.
This is not about faster reports. It is about breaking habits that slow teams down.
Turning questions into shared assets
When a question proves useful more than once, Teela lets you save it as a DataClip.
DataClips turn recurring questions into reusable, trusted assets. They can be run on demand or scheduled to refresh automatically. Instead of living in someone’s inbox, answers become shared reference points.
Shared folders create a single source of truth. Teams see the same answers, with the same definitions, at the same time. There is no confusion about which file is current or which version to trust.
Because DataClips stay live, answers update as the data changes. Teams stop working off stale numbers without having to think about refresh cycles.
This is where Teela stops feeling like a tool and starts feeling like part of the workflow.
Secure by design
Teela was built for real businesses with real security requirements.
Connections are read-only by default. Data is encrypted using AES-256. Access is controlled through role-based permissions. Credentials are isolated and unreadable by anyone.
Sensitive tables and columns can be hidden entirely. Data is never exported and never used to train public models.
Security is not something Teela adds later. It is foundational.
Proof that this works
Teela is already being used by real teams.
Five pilot customers are live today, with two using Teela daily. More than 750 queries have been run in the last three months. Accuracy reaches up to 75 percent without training and approaches 100 percent with training.
One early customer summed it up simply:
“Many of our employees have been able to find data we would have had to wait months to find. Being able to custom query our database has been very helpful.”
This is not about faster reports. It is about breaking habits that slow teams down.
Where Teela fits and where it is going
Traditional BI tools take weeks to build and require deep technical expertise. Many AI analytics tools are expensive, complex, or designed only for large enterprises.
Teela sits in a different place.
It is fast to deploy. Easy to train. Designed for everyday questions. Priced so teams can actually use it.
As Teela moves into V1, the focus remains steady. Fewer bottlenecks. More shared understanding. Decisions made with clarity instead of guesswork.
We did not build Teela because we wanted another dashboard in the world.
We built it because our clients and peers kept telling us the same thing. The tools meant to help them understand their business were quietly slowing them down.
More silos. More ticket queues. Less progress.
Teela is what real teams wish their dashboards would do. Plain English questions. A living business vocabulary. DataClips you can save, schedule, and trust. Shared answers that reduce friction instead of creating it.
Our early users are not just getting answers faster. They are doing better work together.
And once teams experience that shift, it is hard to go back.
