Lightdash, the first open-source business intelligence (BI) platform purpose-built for the modern data stack, has secured $11 million in Series A funding. The round was led by existing investor Accel, which recently backed Zepz and Raycast, with participation from Operator Partners, Shopify Ventures, and existing investor Y Combinator as well as angel investors, including Michael Grinch (Founder and CEO, WorkOS) and Shuo Wang (Co-founder and CRO, Deel).
Funds utilisation
The funding will be used to accelerate product development, build additional technical features and functionality, and expand Lightdash’s developer teams in the US and Europe. It will accelerate the adoption of self-serve data analytics for modern teams.
Andrei Brasoveanu, partner at Accel, said: “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. 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. We’re delighted to continue supporting Hamzah, Oliver, and the Lightdash team.”
Tiantian Feng, Head of Shopify Ventures, said: “This investment reflects our commitment to open source and empowering fast-scaling merchants with the best tools to run their business. We look forward to seeing Lightdash build the next generation of best practices in BI and become an integral part of their customers’ everyday data workflows, for data teams, business teams, end users, and beyond.”
Launches context-specific AI analyst service
In addition to the investment, Lightdash has launched a new, context-specific AI analyst service that is trained to the specific needs and context of each sub-team within an organisation, whether marketing, finance, or HR. This AI analyst will allow specific teams to ask questions of their own data in natural language and receive curated insights relevant to their work, with no need for any data knowledge at all.
What challenge does it tackle?
As businesses create unprecedented volumes of data, the demand for self-serve BI tools, which allow anyone to access and analyse data and optimise business performance, has ballooned into a near $32 billion market opportunity. However, legacy BI platforms silo data and business logic, don’t integrate with other tools, and require extensive SQL and data skills to use.
Founded in 2021 by Hamzah Chaudhary and Oliver Laslett in San Francisco, Lightdash was built as the BI platform they wanted themselves as data practitioners with a developer workflow that leverages best practices from software engineering, native integrations with modern tools, and a user-friendly approach for non-technical stakeholders.
True self-serve analytics
With Lightdash, data teams can turn their dbt projects into a full-stack BI platform, accelerating workflows and ensuring consistent metrics across the entire business. In 2023, the company launched its first commercial product, Lightdash Cloud. Built on top of its open source project and therefore quick to deploy, often a requirement for large enterprises, it has proven incredibly popular, with thousands of weekly users and hundreds of teams using the platform from organisations such as Beauty Pie, Hypebeast, Morning Brew, and Workday. This has resulted in 7x revenue growth in less than 12 months.
Hamzah Chaudhary, founder and CEO of Lightdash, said: “At Lightdash, we want to build self-serve tools that empower data teams to become superheroes. We’ve received incredible feedback on the platform over the last two years, especially since the launch of Lightdash Cloud, and we’re looking forward to continuing to grow our user base and build more powerful BI features like our AI analyst service in the future. We’re excited to continue partnering with Accel and our new investors joining the round on our journey to making all data-driven decisions accessible, actionable, and consistent.”
Don Rudish, Director of Software Engineering at Workday, added: “Lightdash has been the perfect solution for our Business Intelligence needs. The blend of self-service capabilities with robust data governance through dbt has been exactly what we were looking for. The speed at which the Lightdash team develops new features is impressive, and their customer support is outstanding. I can’t say enough good things about Lightdash.”
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