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Enterprise planning and analytics apps that bring budgeting and reporting into the cloud data platforms companies already use.
Over $1M invoiced monthly · A little over 3,000 customers
The customer’s data platform can become the distribution surface: Lumel built apps around Power BI and cloud warehouses instead of asking enterprises to move their data into another silo.
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Gopal Krishnamurthy spent years in business intelligence consulting before turning customer requests into products. His first company, Visual BI, grew quickly in SAP’s ecosystem: he says it went from zero to $10 million in under three years. Add-on software helped open doors, while implementation projects generated much larger service contracts. As customers shifted toward Power BI and cloud platforms such as Snowflake and Databricks, the company retrained its staff and followed the market. Krishnamurthy sold Visual BI’s services business to Atos in 2021 and kept its products, then rebuilt them for a cloud-native architecture. Lumel now sells a suite for planning, reporting and analysis, including apps that work with Power BI and data platforms. The founder reports a little over 3,000 customers across more than 100 countries, about 300 employees, and nearly $12 million in ARR run rate. He describes the company as self-funded, with growth above 100% year over year.
Lumel’s first customers came from an existing enterprise services practice. Visual BI consultants were already inside large companies working on SAP business intelligence, including oil and gas accounts.
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Data credibility: Founder interview with Gopal Krishnamurthy. Lumel’s nearly $12M ARR run rate, monthly invoicing, customer count, geographic reach and growth rate are founder-reported; the interview does not provide audited statements or third-party verification. Historical Visual BI figures are also discussed in the interview.
Visual BI’s add-ons were initially a sales opener: the founder says a customer might pay $20,000–$30,000 for a product, while implementation work could bring in $500,000 to $1 million from that same account. That sequence funded product learning and gave the team a route into enterprise buyers.
Lumel’s growth loop began with platform shifts that made its product choices more relevant. Krishnamurthy describes customers moving away from SAP’s older BI stack toward cloud data platforms, then adopting Power BI as it spread through Microsoft’s enterprise bundle.
Lumel’s Power BI transition required patience: Krishnamurthy says the pivot began in 2017 and that the team made almost no money from it for roughly three years. He frames the bet as a response to repeated customer signals and a technology transition that needed time to mature.
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