data-visualization
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The Hundred No’s That Built a Presentation Factory
Rick Enrico’s software pitch collected roughly 100 rejections. The compliment hidden inside those no’s became SlideGenius - a global agency built for the moment when the meeting matters more than the slides suggest.
The Firm Built on the Idea Everyone Else Called a Fantasy
Two firms said an education-only communications practice would never work. Twenty-five years, 500-plus convenings, and work in every state later, Collaborative has made specialization look less like a constraint than a cheat code.
The $100 Ad That Became a Content System
Column Five started with failed apparel businesses, a roughly $100 banner ad, and infographics that sent millions of visits to Mint. Sixteen years later, it sells something harder to draw: a repeatable way for complicated B2B companies to sound like themselves everywhere.
The Campaign Around the Campaign: How Unearth Makes Influence Feel Personal
Most political advertising buys an audience. Unearth maps the people around the person who matters - then supplies the data, messages and timing to make an issue difficult to ignore.
Message Lab asks: did anybody actually read it?
A client had 82,000 pageviews and a five-second problem. Message Lab at Orchestra builds editorial programs around the difference between attracting a click and earning someone’s attention.
Wondershare Edraw sells a head start on the blank page
A floor plan, a hiring process, a factory bottleneck: Edraw puts them in the same drawing toolbox. Its bet is that the hardest part of explaining an idea is getting the first useful version onto the page.
M’idea Hub and the expensive life of a confusing slide
A presentation can look finished and still leave everyone doing extra work. M’idea Hub builds decks and reusable slide systems for the founders, investors, and teams caught in that gap.
Macrobond wants your next chart to be your last rebuild
The financial research company made a business out of keeping data, analysis and charts connected. Now it is taking that same idea into interactive publishing and AI.
Orgvue lets you rehearse the reorganization
Before a company moves people, it needs to understand the work. Orgvue turns workforce data into costed scenarios - and gives HR and finance a common picture to argue over.
The Software That Taught Investigators to See the Hidden Network
Before knowledge graphs became a boardroom phrase, i2 was helping detectives turn phone logs and witness statements into maps of who knew whom. Thirty-six years later, its most important feature is still the one no model can automate away: showing the analyst their work.
Domo Built the Business Dashboard. Now Its $400 Million Exit Is the Real Data Point
Domo spent 16 years turning scattered corporate data into dashboards, apps, workflows, and AI agents. Its next chapter is a $400 million sale to Progress - a useful lesson in both the power and the economics of becoming a company’s data operating layer.
InetSoft Spent 29 Years Making Business Intelligence Less of an IT Project
The New Jersey software company started with a Java reporting engine and survived every new era of analytics. Its current bet is that the next BI winner will be smaller, embeddable and open enough to run wherever the data already lives.
Qlik’s 33-Year Bet: The Dashboard Was Only Half the Job
Qlik built its name by letting people wander through data instead of following a prewritten query. Then it bought the pipes beneath the charts - and turned a clever analytics engine into a much larger bet on enterprise AI.
Rollstack Found a $13 Million Business Hiding Between the Dashboard and the Boardroom
Companies spent billions modernizing their data stacks, then left analysts copying charts into slides every Friday. Rollstack turned that absurd little gap into an enterprise software company - and its customers say the hours come back fast.
Toucan Bootstrapped to $5 Million ARR - Then Bet the Company on Analytics You Can Talk To
The French founders let customers fund the product before investors got a look. A decade later, Toucan is making a sharper wager: the winning dashboard may be the one users never have to learn.
The Delhi Firm Doing the World's Data Homework
Blackcoffer turns messy enterprise data into dashboards and decisions for clients from consulting giants to a national central bank - 110 people, offices on three continents, and a name that doubles as a mission statement.
ThoughtSpot Is Teaching Business Intelligence to Answer Back
The company that made corporate data searchable is betting that the next dashboard will behave less like a report and more like a careful analyst - one that shows its work.
thorntale
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.