Open-source business intelligence company Metabase announced Thursday a $30 million Series B round led by Insight Partners.
Existing investors Expa and NEA joined in on the round, which gives the San Francisco-based company a total of $42.5 million in funding since it was founded in 2015. Metabase previously raised $8 million in Series A funding back in 2019, led by NEA.
Metabase was developed within venture studio Expa and spun out as an easy way for people to interact with data sets, co-founder and CEO Sameer Al-Sakran told TechCrunch.
“When someone wants access to data, they may not know what to measure or how to use it, all they know is they have the data,” Al-Sakran said. “We provide a self-service access layer where they can ask a question, Metabase scans the data and they can use the results to build models, create a dashboard and even slice the data in ways they choose without having an analyst build out the database.”
He notes that not much has changed in the business intelligence realm since Tableau came out more than 15 years ago, and that computers can do more for the end user, particularly to understand what the user is going to do. Increasingly, open source is the way software and information wants to be consumed, especially for the person that just wants to pull the data themselves, he added.
George Mathew, managing director of Insight Partners, believes we are seeing the third generation of business intelligence tools emerging following centralized enterprise architectures like SAP, then self-service tools like Tableau and Looker and now companies like Metabase that can get users to discovery and insights quickly.
“The third generation is here and they are leading the charge to insights and value,” Mathew added. “In addition, the world has moved to the cloud, and BI tools need to move there, too. This generation of open source is a better and greater example of all three of those.”
To date, Metabase has been downloaded 98 million times and used by more than 30,000 companies across 200 countries. The company pursued another round of funding after building out a commercial offering, Metabase Enterprise, that is doing well, Al-Sakran said.
The new funding round enables the company to build out a sales team and continue with product development on both Metabase Enterprise and Metabase Cloud. Due to Metabase often being someone’s first business intelligence tool, he is also doubling down on resources to help educate customers on how to ask questions and learn from their data.
“Open source has changed from floppy disks to projects on the cloud, and we think end users have the right to see what they are running,” Al-Sakran said. “We are continuing to create new features and improve performance and overall experience in efforts to create the BI system of the future.
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