(Monster Ztudio/Shutterstock)
Lightdash, a business intelligence (BI) platform and open-source alternative to Google’s Locker, announced it has raised $11 million in an early-stage funding round to integrate artificial intelligence into BI solutions.
The new funding will be used to accelerate product development and build additional technical features and functionality to make it easier to adopt self-service AI-powered data analytics.
The round was led by existing investor Accel, with participation from Y Combinator, Operator Partners, Shopify Ventures, and angel investors, including Michael Grinch (Founder and CEO, WorkOS) and Shuo Wang (Co-founder and CRO, Deel).
Since securing $8.4 million in seed funding in 2022, the London-based startup has introduced a hosted cloud service for its core open-source product, along with new features such as enhanced security tools. In 2023, the company launched its first commercial product, Lightdash Cloud.
“Lightdash has demonstrated incredible growth since we partnered with the company for its seed round two years ago, and it has clearly become the most innovative BI platform on the market, “ said Andrei Brasoveanu, partner at Accel.
“Building effective, powerful self-serve BI has been a long-term challenge for data teams of all sizes. We believe the approach Lightdash is taking, providing companies with the tools to make their data teams 10x more productive rather than cut them out completely, is unique and impressive.”
Lightdash, formerly named Hubble, emerged from Y Combinator’s S20 batch, initially focused on testing the quality of data in data warehouses. In 2021, it rebranded as Lightdash and expanded its platform to include BI tools to provide users with the ability to better visualize, explore, and derive actionable insights from their data.
“Data teams want to operate like software teams, but legacy tools haven’t kept up,” shared Hamzah Chaudhary, CEO and Co-Founder, Lightdash via a blog post. “We’ve brought the best practices from the world of software engineering to analytics to build a workflow that is truly data developer-friendly, allowing data teams to get more leverage and enable more people in their teams to self-serve data.”
Some of the top features of Lightdash include its semantic layer support, powerful development workflows, and native integrations with tools such as dbt, providing a unified approach to data management.
LightDash Team
With the fresh cash injection, Lightdash plans to create a “whole new way to self-serve data.” According to Chaudhary, Lightdash’s usage has grown over 50x in the last two years, with two queries being answered every second on the platform.
The revenue has increased sevenfold in the past year, with customers including Workday, Morning Brew, Hypebeast, and Beauty Pie. Additionally, more than 80% of daily active users are non-data team members, successfully answering their own data queries.
Along with the latest funding round, the startup announced the launch of a new context-specific AI Analyst service in Lightdash Cloud. This tool will allow companies to train the model based on specific use cases and enable regular workers to interact with data using natural language queries, with no need for any data knowledge at all.
The AI Analyst uses the same API used by the companies’ standard BI product, ensuring users don’t face any additional security risks. In addition, the AI only requires access to metadata, helping to protect the customers’ actual data and maintain their privacy.
While security and privacy are top priorities, Lightdash is also focused on enhancing user experience and functionality. Lightdash’s upcoming Data Catalog feature will streamline data discovery and exploration, enabling users to quickly access the KPIs and metrics they need to get started. Additionally, Lighdash plans to continue to introduce new features, integrations, and enhanced workflows. To support its rapid growth, Lightdash is also expanding its team in the US and Europe.
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