FactorPrism®
Alternative

A Sisu Alternative That Runs Inside Snowflake

Sisu and Kausa proved that "why did the metric move?" could be answered by software instead of a week of analyst time. Both were acquired by platform vendors in 2023, and neither is available as a standalone product today. If that job still needs doing on your team, here's where the category went — and what to look for in a successor.

The short answer

Sisu Data, the decision-intelligence platform for automated key driver analysis, was acquired by Snowflake in October 2023, and its standalone product is no longer available; Kausa, a root cause analytics startup with a similar mission, was acquired by SAP in September 2023 and folded into SAP Signavio. Teams that relied on them to explain why a metric moved are now largely rebuilding that capability by hand or looking for a successor. FactorPrism® covers the same diagnostic job as a Snowflake Native App: connect a table and get an instant one-sentence verdict of what moved and why, with every factor's contribution reconciling exactly to the total change — and your data never leaves your Snowflake account.

The Category

What Sisu and Kausa Did

Both companies worked on the same hard problem, sometimes called key driver analysis or diagnostic analytics: when a business metric moves, automatically work out which parts of the business are responsible, instead of leaving an analyst to slice dimensions by hand.

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Sisu Data A well-funded decision-intelligence platform backed by Andreessen Horowitz. Sisu connected to cloud data, monitored metrics, and used machine learning to surface the dimension combinations most responsible when a metric changed — delivering in seconds what dashboard archaeology delivered in days.
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Kausa A Berlin startup out of Merantix's venture-building arm, built for root cause analysis of business metrics — an AI engine designed to understand why metrics change within seconds and surface hidden opportunities in the data.

These were pioneering products. They validated the idea that diagnosis — not just visualization — is something software should do, and the demand they identified didn't disappear when they did.

What Happened

What Happened to Them

Within a few months of each other in 2023, both were absorbed by platform vendors:

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Sisu → Snowflake (October 2023) Snowflake acquired Sisu Data in October 2023. The standalone Sisu product was discontinued following the acquisition and is no longer available to new customers.
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Kausa → SAP (September 2023) SAP completed the acquisition of Kausa's technology and team on September 1, 2023, folding its root-cause capabilities into the SAP Signavio process-mining portfolio. Kausa is no longer available as a standalone product.

The net effect for practitioners: two dedicated diagnostic-analytics products left the market, and the job they did moved back onto analysts' desks.

The Checklist

What to Look For in a Replacement

If Sisu or Kausa was doing this job for you — or you evaluated them and the need is still open — the checklist that made them valuable still applies, plus a few lessons the category learned along the way:

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Automatic diagnosis, not another dashboard The point was always an answer — "here's what moved and why" — not another surface to explore. A replacement should lead with the answer.
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An answer that adds up A list of interesting findings that doesn't sum to the change you're explaining can't be handed to finance. Look for exact reconciliation: contributions that tie out to the total, with no unexplained residual.
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Combinations, not just single dimensions The real cause is often a combination — one region's slice of one product line through one channel. One-dimension-at-a-time slicing scatters that effect and loses it.
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Data stays where it lives Standalone platforms meant connectors, copies, and a second security review. The lesson of this category's consolidation is that diagnosis wants to run inside the data platform, under governance you already have.
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Callable by machines as well as people In 2026 the consumer of a diagnosis is as likely to be a pipeline or an AI agent as a person. A replacement should expose the analysis as an API, not only as an app.
The Successor

How FactorPrism® Covers That Job

FactorPrism® is a Snowflake Native App for AI-powered root cause analysis — built for exactly the question Sisu and Kausa pioneered, designed around the checklist above.

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Instant verdict Connect a table and it opens with a one-sentence answer — what moved, why, and the top factors ranked — before any configuration.
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Reconciled attribution Every factor is located at the level of the business where it acts — including combinations like region × product × channel — and the contributions sum exactly to the total change. No residual, no balancing plug. When a movement is genuinely spread across many small contributors, the results say so instead of forcing a single named factor.
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In your account, under your governance Installed from the Snowflake Marketplace; the only integration is a read-only SELECT grant on the tables or views you choose. The entire analysis runs inside your Snowflake account — your data never leaves it.
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Headless for pipelines and agents A stored procedure, API.RUN_DECOMPOSITION, runs the same analysis from a single SQL CALL — from Snowflake tasks, alerting pipelines, or AI agents such as Snowflake Cortex Code.
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Accuracy you can check A published benchmark: 280 blind engine runs against known injected causes, with recall, precision, and the degradation curve published in full.

Honest differences. The overlap with Sisu is the diagnostic job, not the whole platform. Sisu was a standalone cloud service with its own connectors and continuous metric-monitoring workflows across data sources; FactorPrism® focuses on the diagnosis itself and runs where your data already lives in Snowflake — recurring runs are scheduled with ordinary Snowflake tasks via the headless API rather than a built-in monitoring console. If your data isn't in Snowflake, a standalone desktop app (Windows/Mac/Linux) is available. And if you're weighing FactorPrism® against Snowflake's own built-in functions, we keep an honest side-by-side comparison — including what the built-ins do well.

FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

What happened to Sisu Data?

Sisu Data, the decision-intelligence platform for automated key driver analysis, was acquired by Snowflake in October 2023. Following the acquisition, the standalone Sisu product was discontinued and is no longer available to new customers.

What happened to Kausa?

SAP completed the acquisition of Kausa's technology and team on September 1, 2023. Kausa's root cause analysis capabilities were folded into SAP Signavio's process-mining portfolio, and Kausa is no longer available as a standalone product.

What is the closest Sisu alternative that runs inside Snowflake?

FactorPrism® is a Snowflake Native App for AI-powered root cause analysis. Like Sisu, it answers "why did this metric change?" automatically: connect a table and it opens with an instant one-sentence verdict of what moved and why, with the top factors ranked and every contribution reconciling exactly to the total change. Because it runs as a Native App, the analysis executes inside your Snowflake account — your data never leaves it — and a headless procedure, API.RUN_DECOMPOSITION, runs the same analysis from a single SQL CALL. It's free during early access on the Snowflake Marketplace.

Does FactorPrism® do everything Sisu did?

Not everything — the overlap is the diagnostic job. Sisu was a standalone cloud platform with its own connectors and continuous metric-monitoring workflows across data sources. FactorPrism® focuses on the diagnosis itself and runs where your data already lives: it needs only a read-only grant on a Snowflake table or view, and recurring runs are scheduled with ordinary Snowflake tasks via its headless API rather than a built-in monitoring console. For teams whose data isn't in Snowflake, a standalone desktop app is also available.

See the diagnosis on your own metric

Watch the 73-second demo, or install from the Snowflake Marketplace and run the built-in demo on sample data — no data connection needed. Free during early access.

Get it on Snowflake Marketplace

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