Startups Venture

Metabase, An Uber Co-founder’s New Big Data Startup, Raises $13M

Early on Monday morning, open source analytics company Metabase filed paperwork with the SEC indicating it raised just over $13 million in a new round of equity-only funding. Board member information disclosed in the filing suggests that NEA led the deal. A dozen other undisclosed investors also participated.

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This is the first publicly-disclosed funding for the company, which was founded in November 2014 according to Crunchbase. Metabase appears to be one of Expa’s spinout projects. Expa is a startup studio co-founded by Garrett Camp (co-founder of Uber and StumbleUpon) and Roberto Sanabria (former global search lead at Google, director of analytics at StumbleUpon, and senior manager of business analytics at LinkedIn), among a few other folks listed in the About page on Expa’s website.

Camp and Sanabria are two of three executive directors listed on Metabase’s filing. The other is Sameer Al-Sakran, who serves as Metabase’s CEO. The fourth individual listed on the filing is Julia Schottenstein, a principal at NEA.

Metabase (the software) helps its users ask questions with data. In an example in Metabase’s documentation, a business analyst could connect an order database and build a query for all orders over a certain subtotal all through a visual interface. Metabase runs the underlying computations and offers ways to visualize data and share the answers it finds with a team.

As open-source software, its source code is openly available online for free. Metabase makes money by offering a number of professional services like managed hosting, support, and assistance with implementing Metabase in a custom analytics or business intelligence setup. Its business model is in the same spirit as Databricks, which develops custom analytics tooling and a proprietary runtime on top of Apache Spark, another open-source analytics framework. Crunchbase News covered Databricks’s latest round last week.

Crunchbase News reached out to Metabase as soon as we saw the filing, but we did not receive a reply prior to publication. We will update this piece as we learn more.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias

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