Business intelligence (BI) platform Lightdash has raised $8.4 million in Seed funding in a round led by Accel. Simultaneously, Lighthouse announced that hosted product Lightdash Cloud, is also now available in public beta, after receiving a waitlist of more than 600 pre-qualified companies.
Other investors include Moonfire, Y Combinator, along with angel investors, including Snyk founder Guy Podjarny, Gitlab CMO Ashley Kramer, dbt founder Tristan Handy and former Qlik CEO Lars Bjork.
Lightdash said the round includes a previously unannounced $2.4m pre-seed round led by Moonfire.
Andrei Brasoveanu, Partner at Accel, said existing BI tools are increasingly unfit, failing to meet the needs of both the a data analyst and data consumer.
“We love how Lightdash’s forward-thinking BI platform puts native integrations, open-source, and efficiency front-and-center. We’re impressed by the early organic traction that Hamzah, Oliver, and the team have achieved so far and we believe that Lightdash has the potential to radically reshape the BI market in the years to come.”
The company will use the new capital to develop and expand platform functionality, accelerate hiring and work on the Lightdash University.
Lighthouse has been created based on the fact there has been a huge boom in publicly available data, which is growing by the minute. While it may be easy to access some of this information, packaging it into something that is actionable can be a challenge.
Lightdash is said to natively integrate with data tools like dbt, Snowflake, Airbyte, and Fivetran, enabling better data-driven decisions by making BI more accessible for stakeholders. Lightdash’s tools are created to easily define business metrics, before feeding the data into BI applications across the organization. The information is packaged to make it more usable for non-technical stakeholders.
Launched in 2021, Lightdash was founded in 2021 by CEO Hamzah Chaudhary and CTO Oliver Laslett as an open-source BI platform purpose-built for dbt and the emerging modern data stack. The pair met at insurtech startup Cytora.
Chaudhary explained that data-driven decision-making is central to the success of any modern business.
“Yet while every company has data, metrics, and KPIs, they aren’t always measured or understood in the same way across a business. Without this, companies can find their teams adrift when it comes to working towards a shared strategic objective,” said Chaudhary. “Everyone from the graduate analyst to the CEO needs to have the shared same context. That’s what we mean by the ‘Lightdash Way’ – we want to empower all business stakeholders to answer their own data questions by making business intelligence accessible, actionable and consistent. We are incredibly excited to partner with Accel and bring our vision for true data self-serve to companies across the world.”
