A YC W24 company set out to fix the ugliest workflow in data: getting a live number out of Snowflake and into a slide without it going stale. Three engineers, one contrarian bet, and a clean look at where the deck fits in the data stack.
Somewhere in almost every company there is a moment nobody puts on a slide, because it happens right before the slides. An analyst runs a clean query. The number is correct. Then it gets screenshotted, dragged into Google Slides, resized until it's a little blurry, and shipped to a board. By the time the deck is opened, the number is a week old and the query that made it is gone. thorntale (YC W24) built a company around that exact moment.
The pitch was narrow on purpose. Instead of pasting a picture of a chart into a deck, you connected the deck to the data. A slide could pull straight from Snowflake, Postgres, or a Google Sheet, render the chart natively, and stay current. If someone in the meeting asked to see it by region, you could re-cut the chart on the spot rather than promising a follow-up email. The number on the screen and the number in the warehouse were the same number.
It is a small idea. It is also the kind of small idea that, once you see it, you cannot un-see in your own workday.
The founders did not invent the pain; they lived it. Their own description of a typical data journey read like a warning label - a number bouncing across half a dozen systems before it reached the one place executives actually look.
Each hop is a place where a filter gets forgotten, a date range drifts, or last quarter's export sneaks into this quarter's deck. Companies were spending real money on data teams and warehouses, then losing fidelity in the last ten feet - the copy from the tool to the talk. thorntale framed its own reason for existing plainly: teams "invest heavily in data teams and advanced tooling but still struggle to incorporate their work into decision-making."
Here is the part worth slowing down on. For a decade, the industry consensus has been that the dashboard would replace the deck. Why present a static chart when you could send a live link? thorntale bet the other way, and CEO Ellen Hui gave the bet its best one-liner.
"Any data tool that lives long enough becomes a BI tool."
Ellen Hui · Co-Founder & CEO, thorntale
The observation cuts in two directions. Yes, dashboards multiply - but they also get ignored. People do not gather in a room to stare at a dashboard. They gather to hear someone walk them through a story, one slide at a time. The presentation, thorntale argued, is not a legacy artifact on the way out. It is the durable interface where data actually gets discussed, defended, and decided on. So rather than fight the deck, they tried to make it honest.
In practice, thorntale looked less like PowerPoint and more like a document editor that happened to know about databases. It leaned on Notion-style block editing and opinionated, designer-built themes, so a data scientist who could not name three fonts still ended up with a deck that looked deliberate. The three moving parts that mattered:
Live connectors. Direct hookups to Google Sheets, Snowflake, and PostgreSQL, with more planned. A chart on a slide was a query, not a picture of a query.
Native, re-segmentable charts. Because the chart was live, it could be sliced during the meeting. The dreaded "can we see that by cohort?" became a click instead of a homework assignment.
Templates with a point of view. The starting decks were built for product, data, and engineering teams - weekly OKR updates, post-mortems, board decks - the recurring presentations where the same charts get rebuilt from scratch every single week.
thorntale's resume was heavier than its headcount. It started as three founders and stayed small. Dori Wilson, the founding CEO, is a data scientist who built data narratives at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, Uber, CircleCI, Mux, and Pave - which is to say, someone who has personally suffered through building the same board chart a hundred times. Ellen Hui, later CEO, came from backend and infrastructure work at Microsoft (petabyte-scale queries), Cruise (site reliability), and Mux (real-time video); she owned the connectors and the plumbing. John Stimac, the CTO, is a full-stack and data engineer out of Yelp and Clockwise.
It is a telling mix. Two of the three spent their careers on the infrastructure side of data, not the design side. The product's instinct - that the honest chart matters more than the pretty one, and that both are achievable - reads directly off those backgrounds.
Companies invest heavily in data teams and advanced tooling but still struggle to incorporate their work into decision-making.
thorntale, on the problem it set out to close
The model was freemium B2B SaaS: open, free signups at the bottom, paid tiers for teams that needed data-source integrations and distribution. The buyers were the people who build recurring decks - product managers, data scientists, engineers, and business-operations teams - inside technology companies. Funding stayed lean and early: roughly $500,000 in a pre-seed round backed by Y Combinator and Pioneer Fund, closed in early 2024.
The competitive map was crowded from two directions. On one side sat story-first tools like Tome and the AI-deck generators. On the other sat the data-storytelling and BI platforms - Toucan Toco, Grow, Plotly's Dash, and the embedded-analytics crowd. But thorntale's real competitor was never a logo. It was the habit: Google Slides plus a screenshot from Looker. Habits are the hardest incumbents to unseat, because they are free and already installed in everyone's hands.
Ideas rarely sit still for a two-person team, and thorntale's did not. Over 2025 the product drifted toward a broader, AI-powered presentation editor - automatic layouts, AI slide creation, proofreading - and in September the team shipped a genuinely useful free tool called AI Presentation Review: upload your slides as a PDF, record yourself talking through them, and get back actionable feedback. No signup, again.
Then the company did the thing most startups avoid. It said so out loud. A note went up that thorntale Presentations would shut down at the end of 2025, and Y Combinator now lists the company as inactive. That is not a footnote to skip past. A clean, public wind-down is more information than a hundred launch tweets - it tells you the team knew the difference between a real idea and a real business, and did not pretend otherwise.
The idea outlives the product. The copy-paste chart is still there, in your last board deck and your next one. thorntale's argument - that data deserves better than a screenshot on its most important day - did not get less true when the company stopped shipping. If anything, it is the kind of problem that waits patiently for the next team to walk into the same room and notice the same quiet moment.