thorntale (YC W24) is a San Francisco software company that built presentation tools for data storytelling. Instead of screenshotting charts from Looker or Snowflake into Google Slides, teams could connect live data sources directly into decks, so charts stayed interactive and up to date - even re-segmentable during a live Q&A. Founded in 2024 by data scientist Dori Wilson with engineers Ellen Hui and John Stimac, the company later pivoted toward an AI-powered presentation editor and shipped a free AI Presentation Review tool before winding the core Presentations product down at the end of 2025.
Grafana Labs is the company behind Grafana, the widely used open-source dashboarding and observability platform. Founded in 2014 to commercialize Torkel Odegaard's visualization tool, it has grown into a full-stack observability vendor built on a 'big tent' philosophy - letting teams unify metrics, logs, traces and profiles from any source without ripping out existing tools. Its LGTM stack (Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir) plus Grafana Cloud and Grafana Enterprise now serve more than 7,000 paying organizations, including roughly 70% of the Fortune 50, with the business surpassing $400M in annual recurring revenue and a $6B valuation.
Nomic AI is a New York-based artificial intelligence company building tools to make large, unstructured datasets and AI models understandable and usable by everyone. It is best known for Atlas, a browser-based platform for visualizing and interacting with massive datasets; the open-source Nomic Embed family of text, code, and multimodal embedding models; and GPT4All, an ecosystem for running large language models privately on everyday hardware. Since 2025 the company has focused its platform on the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) sector, applying its embedding and retrieval technology to drawing review, code compliance, and document-heavy construction workflows.
SEAD Software LLC is an Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey company that builds enterprise applications on Co-Wright, its proprietary low-code/no-code development platform. Combining full-stack development teams with drag-and-drop tooling, SEAD helps mid-sized businesses across finance, manufacturing, healthcare, supply chain, real estate and non-profits consolidate scattered data into a 'single portal of truth,' automate operations, and stand up custom, white-labeled applications at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional development.
Cleartelligence is a Newton, Massachusetts-based data and AI consulting firm that helps mid-market and enterprise organizations turn complex, siloed data into clear, usable intelligence. Founded in 2011, it delivers analytics and visualization, data engineering and architecture, artificial intelligence, and data strategy advisory across finance, healthcare and life sciences, manufacturing, retail, technology, and the public sector. Backed by private equity firm Align Capital Partners since 2022, the firm has grown through acquisitions of Winter Sun and Bardess Group and opened a delivery center in Hyderabad, India, in 2025.
Appsmith is an open-source, low-code platform that lets developers quickly build internal tools - admin panels, dashboards, CRUD apps, and workflow automations - by dragging pre-built UI widgets onto a canvas and wiring them to databases and APIs with JavaScript. Founded in 2019 by Abhishek Nayak, Arpit Mohan, and Nikhil Nandagopal, the company positions itself as the developer-first, self-hostable alternative to closed platforms like Retool, and has expanded into AI-powered agents that give business teams context-aware automation on top of their own data.
Deepnote is a cloud-based, collaborative data notebook that reimagines the Jupyter notebook for teams. Founded in 2019 in San Francisco, it lets data scientists and analysts connect data sources, write Python, SQL and R, and work together in real time - like a Google Docs for data. In recent years it has leaned heavily into AI, adding an agent that can generate, edit and debug entire notebooks, and it went open source in 2025.
Foxglove is a San Francisco company building a data and observability platform for robotics and Physical AI. Its tools let engineers record, sync, search, and visualize the multimodal sensor data their robots produce - 3D point clouds, video, GNSS, and proprioceptive streams - so teams can debug and improve autonomous systems without building expensive in-house infrastructure. Founded in 2021 by two Cruise and Coinbase veterans, Foxglove maintains the open-source MCAP file format (now the default recording format in ROS 2) and counts NVIDIA, Amazon, Anduril, Wayve, and Waabi among its users.
Lightdash is an open-source business intelligence platform built natively on dbt. It turns a data team's dbt models into a governed semantic layer, letting analysts define metrics as code and letting everyone else explore data - and, increasingly, ask AI agents questions - without writing SQL. Founded in 2020 (originally as Hubble in Y Combinator's S20 batch), it positions itself as an open, developer-first alternative to Looker and is backed by Accel, Shopify Ventures, Operator Partners and Y Combinator.
MetaCell is a life-science software company staffed by scientists and software engineers who turn messy neuroscience and biology data - microscopy, MRI, EEG, electrophysiology, biologically accurate simulations - into usable, shareable, enterprise-grade online tools. Founded by the trio behind the OpenWorm project, MetaCell builds custom scientific software, cloud workspaces, and data pipelines for pharma companies and top research institutions including Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Biogen, Eisai, the Allen Institute, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and universities like Princeton, Yale, and UCL.
Recidiviz is a nonprofit technology company that stitches together the fragmented data trapped inside America's prison, parole and probation systems and turns it into usable tools. Its platform - and its newer AI-powered Case Planning Assistant - helps corrections agencies in roughly 19 states surface people eligible for early release, automate case triage, and connect returning citizens to housing, treatment and jobs. Founded in 2019 as a volunteer project at Google, Recidiviz's mission is to accelerate progress toward a smaller, fairer, safer justice system.
Scoop Analytics is a San Francisco AI analytics company that gives every employee the reach of a data science team. Its agentic 'Domain Intelligence' platform autonomously investigates business data - screening every location every week to explain what happened, why it happened, and what to do next - and delivers those findings inside Slack. Founded by Birst creator Brad Peters, Scoop raised $3.5M in seed funding to make self-service business intelligence real for people who have spreadsheet skills, not data teams.
Tolemi is a Boston-based govtech company whose flagship platform, BuildingBlocks, stitches together scattered municipal data - property records, ownership, code violations, tax liens - into a single map-based interface. State and local governments use it to run spatial analysis, spot problem properties, and make faster, data-driven decisions about housing, land use, and neighborhood revitalization. Formerly OpportunitySpace, the company rebranded to Tolemi after Y Combinator and today serves cities from New York to small towns across the U.S.
John Marshall is the President and CEO of Userful, the software company that swapped racks of proprietary AV hardware for a browser and a network cable. Named CEO in October 2018, he pivoted a video-wall vendor into a software-defined platform for enterprise-wide operational awareness, the Userful Infinity Platform, now used by hundreds of enterprises across control rooms, command centers and digital signage. A Northwestern and University of Michigan graduate with 25-plus years leading wireless, IoT and networking startups, he ran Userful to 50% year-over-year enterprise sales growth in 2024 with 80% of revenue flowing through a global channel of roughly 100 partners. Off the clock he is a former backcountry guide and adventure racer turned birder.
Bedrock Analytics is an Oakland-based B2B SaaS company that turns the messy syndicated sales data CPG (consumer packaged goods) brands buy from sources like NielsenIQ and Circana into clear, automated selling stories. Built 'by CPG people for CPG people,' its cloud platform harmonizes retail data and uses a multi-model AI stack (ChatGPT, Claude, Llama) to generate visualizations, insights, and AI-driven sales decks - helping brand sales teams win shelf space and category reviews. The company tracks more than $100 billion in CPG sales across 80+ categories every month.
David Lehrer is the founder and CEO of Conatix and its flagship product Cysana, an AI cybersecurity venture that turns executable files into pictures so neural networks can spot malware before it ever runs. A Harvard-trained policy researcher turned deep-tech operator, he built the company across Virginia, New York, Montreal, London and Berlin, in partnership with the University of Luxembourg's SnT research center. His unusual path runs from criminology at Oxford and economics at the Bank of Finland to a patented anti-ransomware engine trained on a European supercomputer.
Stephen Larson is a neuroscientist and entrepreneur who co-founded OpenWorm, the open-science effort to build the first complete digital organism by simulating the 302-neuron nervous system of the roundworm C. elegans. He is co-founder and CEO of MetaCell, a life-science software company that helps pharmaceutical firms and research institutions visualize, analyze, and collaborate on complex biological data. Trained at MIT in computer science and AI and at UC San Diego in neuroscience, he sits at the intersection of code and biology, betting that understanding a worm in silico is a first step toward understanding the human brain.
Quid is an AI-powered consumer and market intelligence platform that reads billions of structured and unstructured data points - news, social posts, reviews, patents, forums - and turns them into business outcomes. Born from the 2020 merger of NetBase (social listening) and Quid Inc. (AI text analytics and network visualization), the company now sells a workflow platform (Q Platform) and a library of AI agents (Q Agents) so brands can see what's coming and decide what to do about it before competitors do.
Tom Sawyer Software is a Berkeley, California company founded in 1992 - the first commercial firm devoted entirely to graph visualization, layout, and analysis. Its low-code platform, Tom Sawyer Perspectives, plus tools like Explorations and the SysML v2 Viewer, let enterprises, governments, and software vendors turn tangled networks of data into readable pictures: fraud rings, supply chains, telecom topologies, and system models. Bootstrapped, profitable, and global, it has spent three decades drawing the lines between things.
Akkio is a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based AI company that builds an AI-native platform for media agencies and data providers. It lets non-technical teams chat with their data, build no-code predictive models, segment audiences, simulate media plans, and generate campaign reports in minutes rather than weeks. Founded in 2019, Akkio started as a no-code machine learning tool for small businesses and has since refocused on automating the full campaign workflow for the advertising and media industry, with customers including Horizon Media, Havas, and LG Ad Solutions.
Metabase is an open source business intelligence and embedded analytics platform that lets anyone - not just analysts - ask questions of their data and build dashboards without writing SQL. Founded in 2014 and spun out of the Expa venture studio, it pairs a friendly visual query builder with a full SQL editor, connects to 20+ databases, and offers white-label embedding so software companies can ship customer-facing analytics. With a free self-hosted edition and paid Cloud and Enterprise tiers, Metabase is used by tens of thousands of companies worldwide.
PolicyMap is a Philadelphia-based cloud mapping and data analytics platform that lets anyone build custom maps, reports, and dashboards from more than 75,000 curated indicators drawn from 170-plus public and proprietary sources - no GIS expertise required. Spun out of the Reinvestment Fund, it serves banks, universities, hospitals, governments, and nonprofits that need to turn place-based data into decisions about housing, health, lending, and community investment.
Jim Bartoo is the CEO and a board member of Visual Action Software, a Texas-based enterprise visualization company built on patented Flaremap treemap technology that helps organizations spot threats, monitor performance, and reduce risk. A Cornell-trained engineer with an MBA from the same school, he spent more than 25 years across Oracle, Business Objects, and EDS before leading The Hive Group and engineering its 2015 merger that formed today's Visual Action.
Xyicon is a Napa, California cloud platform that lets teams 'think outside the spreadsheet' by merging spreadsheet data with PDF and CAD diagrams. Founded in 2000 by Jason Chavez, its SpaceRunner application turns floor plans, elevations and Revit drawings into interactive maps where every asset, room and piece of equipment becomes a data-rich 'Xyicon' you can see, track and report on. It is used across facilities management, capital construction programs, and healthcare facility planning to cut procurement costs, shorten timelines and reduce data errors.
Maggie McCullough is the CEO and founder of PolicyMap, the Philadelphia-based mapping and data-visualization platform she launched in 2008. A former White House budget-office staffer turned housing researcher, she built PolicyMap after struggling to fit maps and data into her own policy work, betting that anyone should be able to make a map as easily as they shop online. The platform now serves universities, banks, health systems, nonprofits and governments, layering thousands of public and proprietary datasets into one searchable map. In December 2023 the company closed a $3 million Series A led by its former parent, the Reinvestment Fund.
Visual Action Software builds operational visualization tools for organizations drowning in big data. Its patented Flaremap technology - a descendant of the treemap - powers the Visual Action Platform, turning dense, real-time data into visual interfaces that help analysts spot threats, monitor performance, and reduce risk. The company serves defense and national intelligence, financial services, healthcare, and core infrastructure customers from its base in Orchard Park, New York.
Userful is a software company that turns the wall of screens in a control room or lobby into something you manage from a browser. Its Infinity Platform delivers AV over standard IP networks, replacing racks of proprietary matrix-switching hardware with software that distributes any source to any display. Used by more than 1,000 organizations, including 50-plus Fortune 500 firms, Userful focuses on mission-critical environments where seeing the right data at the right moment matters - operations centers, transportation hubs, factories, and corporate signage.
Ryan Janssen is the Co-founder and CEO of Zenlytic, a New York-based AI-powered business intelligence platform that lets non-technical users query data in plain English. A former McKinsey consultant and 6-year venture capital investor with advanced degrees from Harvard and Oxford, Ryan co-founded Zenlytic in 2020 alongside CTO Paul Blankley after spotting a gap: companies had modern data infrastructure but no accessible way to use it. Zenlytic has raised $15.4M including a $9M Series A in 2024 led by M13, and its AI analyst Zoe can now onboard itself autonomously to any data warehouse.
Sameer Al-Sakran is the co-founder and CEO of Metabase, the open-source business intelligence tool that grew into an 8-figure ARR company used by more than 70,000 organizations. He spent four years building Metabase without charging a dollar, then turned it into a product-led growth case study by burying a single call-to-action deep in the admin panel and letting the software sell itself. A career machine-learning and data person, he worked in data science, engineering, and venture before deciding the world needed a simpler way to ask a database a question.
Sigma is a cloud-native analytics and business intelligence company that lets anyone explore live data from cloud warehouses like Snowflake, Databricks and BigQuery through a familiar spreadsheet-style interface - no SQL required. Now pivoting into 'agentic analytics,' Sigma layers no-code AI agents on top of governed warehouse data so business teams can ask questions, build apps and trigger actions directly against the data, with security and governance intact.