Seattle Startup Summation Emerges with $35M to Transform Business Decision-Making

In the heart of Bellevue, Washington, a new AI venture called Summation has just stepped out of the shadows with significant momentum and financial backing. Founded in 2024, the company recently announced it has secured $35 million in funding from venture capital heavyweights Benchmark and Kleiner Perkins. This substantial investment signals strong confidence in Summation’s mission to revolutionize how enterprise leaders approach critical business decisions through what they call their “decision-grade AI platform.” The technology promises to be more than just another analytics tool, instead offering executives the ability to extract meaningful insights from vast amounts of internal company data—insights that can directly shape strategic direction and business outcomes.

At the helm of Summation stands CEO Ian Wong, whose impressive track record includes co-founding and serving as CTO at real estate technology giant Opendoor, as well as being Square’s first-ever data scientist. Wong’s journey to founding Summation stems from personal frustration with traditional business intelligence processes. He recounts walking into executive meetings at Opendoor armed with dashboards and spreadsheets, only to face strategic questions that couldn’t be answered on the spot—questions like “why did this metric change?” or “what action should we take next?” By the time his team could compile answers weeks later, the opportunity window had often closed. This gap between data availability and actionable insights is precisely what Summation aims to bridge, turning raw information into timely strategic guidance that can meaningfully influence business trajectory.

The technology underpinning Summation’s platform represents a significant advancement in applied artificial intelligence for business contexts. Rather than simply sitting alongside existing data systems, Summation’s solution integrates on top of them, performing complex calculations automatically and at scale. What sets the platform apart is its ability to simultaneously test different scenarios and deploy AI agents to explore various business questions in parallel—capabilities that would require enormous human effort to replicate. The system also addresses mundane but critical financial processes by automating reconciliations, variance analysis, and management reporting, freeing human analysts to focus on higher-value strategic thinking. This combination of automated insight generation and routine task handling creates a powerful toolset for executives navigating increasingly complex business environments.

While Summation has kept specific revenue metrics and customer numbers close to the vest, the company has shared an impressive case study involving Fanatics, a major player in the sports merchandise space. According to Summation, their platform helped Fanatics uncover more than $10 million in combined growth and cost-saving opportunities, while simultaneously reducing reporting cycles. This kind of tangible business impact represents exactly the value proposition Summation is bringing to market—not just insights for insights’ sake, but direct financial improvements through better, faster decision-making. As artificial intelligence continues to transform enterprise operations, Summation positions itself at the intersection of data science, business intelligence, and strategic leadership—a potentially lucrative space as companies increasingly seek competitive advantages through technology.

The founding team at Summation brings together complementary expertise that likely contributed to investor confidence. Wong co-founded the company with Ramachandran “RC” Ramarathinam, who previously led Opendoor’s core transaction platform, bringing deep technical implementation experience to complement Wong’s data science background. In the short time since its founding, the team has already grown to approximately 40 employees, with most working in person at the company’s Bellevue headquarters—bucking the remote-first trend that has dominated much of the tech industry in recent years. This emphasis on in-person collaboration might reflect the company’s focus on building complex systems that benefit from close team interaction and rapid iteration cycles as they refine their AI approach to business decision support.

The venture capital backing behind Summation speaks volumes about market expectations for the company. Benchmark led Summation’s seed funding round, while Kleiner Perkins spearheaded the Series A—two of the most prestigious names in technology investing. Board members include Chetan Puttagunta from Benchmark and Josh Coyne from Kleiner Perkins, bringing additional expertise and industry connections. Puttagunta’s observation that “every major technology wave has required a rethink of enterprise infrastructure” frames Summation’s opportunity in historical context—positioning the company as potentially foundational infrastructure for the AI era in business. As organizations worldwide struggle with information overload and increasing decision complexity, Summation’s approach of surfacing insights that “even the best analysts miss” could represent a significant step forward in how enterprises leverage their data for competitive advantage in an increasingly AI-driven business landscape.