At Lansweeper, the dashboard requests kept coming. Customers wanted clearer reports, more control, and numbers where they actually worked. The engineers could build those things. They were simply occupied with the other half of the product: collecting and preparing information about all the devices in a company’s IT estate. Every new chart would bring filters, permissions, maintenance, and the next request. In time, the reporting queue began to look less like a feature and more like a second company.
Lansweeper chose Luzmo, a Belgian maker of embedded analytics. Its chief product officer, Maarten Saeys, says the switch let the team skip about three years of development. That is a customer’s estimate, not a stopwatch reading. Still, it captures the odd economics of software: the cheaper-looking choice can be the one that costs years.
In brief / what matters
- Luzmo puts dashboards, a dashboard editor, and AI answers inside other companies’ apps.
- Its buyer is the product team; the eventual reader of the chart is that team’s customer.
- The published plan starts at €1,995 a month, billed annually, with adoption-based usage on top.
- The useful test is the cost of maintaining analytics after the first attractive chart ships.
The first chart is the bait
Luzmo’s three founders came to the problem from consulting. Karel Callens and Haroen Vermylen say they watched traditional business intelligence projects consume time and money before delivering answers people could use. They started Cumul.io in 2015 with Thomas De Clerck. The original bet was straightforward: if an application already holds data that its customers need, the application should be able to show it without a bespoke BI project every time.
The company renamed itself Luzmo in 2023. It said the old identity limited its growth; the new one was meant to speak to the outcome rather than the machinery. By then it had offices on both sides of the Atlantic and had announced a €10 million Series A led by Hi Inov-Dentressangle. It said more than 240 SaaS customers used the platform at the time. The point of the business had become sharper: help software companies give their own users analytics inside the software they already pay for.
The person buying it never sees the chart
That sentence is only slightly unfair. A SaaS product manager may inspect every dashboard, but the real audience is a customer trying to answer a Tuesday afternoon question: Which stores missed target? Which devices need attention? Which campaign paid for itself? Internal BI tools can answer those questions for analysts. Luzmo is engineered for questions that appear inside a product, under that product’s brand, for many separate customer accounts.
This distinction explains the unglamorous features. A chart must open under the correct tenant. A user in one account must not see another account’s data. A dashboard may need a different language, currency, time zone, or set of permissions. A customer might want to edit a report without filing a support ticket. None of these make a particularly good demo thumbnail. Together they decide whether an embedded dashboard is a product or a liability.
The working arrangement
The customer keeps the product relationship; Luzmo supplies the analytics layer behind the experience.
Luzmo Studio is the low-code route: build a dashboard, apply a theme, embed it. The Embedded Dashboard Editor lets authorized users change their own views. Flex gives developers an SDK for charts that do not fit a standard canvas, while retaining Luzmo’s query and access-control machinery. IQ adds natural-language questions, summaries and visual answers. The company sells these as variations on one infrastructure decision rather than separate islands of reporting.
“With Luzmo, we skipped three years of development time and immediately jumped to a full-blown BI solution.”Maarten Saeys / CPO, Lansweeper
What broke before anyone bought a shortcut
Lansweeper’s first problem was not an inability to draw a graph. Its engineering strengths lay in data collection and preparation, while its reporting backlog grew and customer requests kept arriving. Luzmo’s editor gave users a way to explore the data themselves; Flex placed visualizations on asset pages and troubleshooting screens, closer to the moment of need. Saeys described the buying case in terms of engineers and opportunity cost. That is a more useful way to price a dashboard than counting lines of code.
Another customer, InTouch, had the opposite kind of backlog: a decade-old Jaspersoft reporting system. Its product team ran a two-month comparison against ThoughtSpot, then selected Luzmo. InTouch says product staff could build dashboards independently, retired the legacy setup and sold a fuller analytics module as an upsell. Its account also makes an awkward point about AI-heavy sales pitches: a capability that requires constant vendor help may be less useful than a plainer tool a small team can actually operate.
A question asked outside the dashboard
The next step is less about prettier charts than about where a question happens. Luzmo IQ lets a user ask in plain language and receive a chart-backed answer. In June 2026 the company shipped an embedded MCP server and a unified Agent API, so a software company could put governed analytics inside its own agent or another workflow. In September it consolidated separate AI panels into a universal agent able to build and edit a whole dashboard in a conversation. It also added agent queries to the same logs as dashboard queries. When an answer looks wrong, someone can inspect the query instead of admiring the prose.
That is Luzmo’s competitive argument against building everything yourself and against adapting a general BI system: it treats the customer-facing interface, data access and newer AI features as one problem. It will not be the right purchase for every product. A tiny user base with simple reporting may find the subscription hard to justify; a team with substantial in-house analytics expertise may prefer full ownership. And no vendor can rescue a dataset whose definitions are confused. Those are ordinary conditions of a real buying decision, not a defect in the arithmetic.
The lesson hidden in the backlog
What can another product team copy? Begin by listing the reporting requests that keep returning. Separate the data work unique to your product from the dashboard work shared by thousands of products. Build a small proof with real tenant permissions, not a single friendly demo account. Ask whether users can change a view without asking an engineer. Then cost the first release and the next two years of fixes, support, security and localization. Only then compare the quote.
Luzmo did not invent the desire to look at numbers. It noticed that software companies repeatedly rebuilt the same bridge between data and decisions. Lansweeper’s alleged three-year saving is striking; the more portable insight is quieter. Sometimes the most valuable feature on the roadmap is the one your team decides it no longer has to build.