Funds and Launch for BI Platform Lightdash

London-based open source Business Intelligence platform Lightdash has launched its core product for general use, and announced seed funding of $8.4m.

The firm, co-founded by current CEO Hamzah Chaudhary and CTO Oliver Laslett, was part of the Y Combinator business incubation stable; was originally known as Hubble; and focused on helping clients assess the quality of data in their data warehouses, feeding the results into BI tools. Around eighteen months ago the name was changed to Lightdash and the focus to providing business users with tools for making use of the raw data in these warehouses. This includes both analysts / data scientists who can build custom workflows and define their own metrics and KPIs, using SQL and a standard text editing tool; and non-technical staff in functions such as marketing and finance who access a visual front-end.

Chaudhary (pictured) comments: 'Modern data analysts are becoming increasingly like software developers, but they're stuck with enterprise user-interfaces that lock in business logic and slow them down. Lightdash gives productivity tools to analysts, which allows them to deploy BI at enterprise scales with substantially less effort'.

The seed round, part of which will be used to expand beyond the current headcount of eight, was led by Accel, with participation from Moonfire, Snyk founder Guy Podjarny, and Gitlab CMO Ashley Kramer, as well as Y Combinator itself.

Web site: www.lightdash.com .