Lightdash takes on Looker with an open-source BI platform built for dbt
Lightdash, an open-source business intelligence (BI) platform that sets out to challenge proprietary incumbents such as Looker, officially launches its core business product to the public today today, supported by $8.4 million in funding. The round was led by Accel, with participation from Moonfire, Y Combinator (YC), Snyk Founder Guy Podjarny, and Gitlab CMO Ashley Kramer.
In its original form, Lightdash was known as Hubble when it graduated from YC's S20 bundle, with the goal of helping companies run tests on their data warehouse to identify data quality issues. These data quality metrics, as they turned out, were most useful in BI tools, which co-founder and CEO Hamzah Chaudhary says no BI tool on the market supports. So they pivoted the product to Lightdash and started working on the new project full-time in May 2021 to solve a big problem for data analysts.
"Modern data analysts look more and more like software developers, but they're stuck with enterprise user interfaces that lock down business logic and slow them down," Chaudhary told TechCrunch. "Lightdash provides productivity tools for analysts, allowing them to deploy BI enterprise-wide with much less effort."
Lightdash is specifically designed for dbt, a command line-based data transformation tool that allows analysts to transform raw data in their warehouse using SQL and their usual text editor. Dbt is the "t" in "extract, load, transform (ELT), and Lightdash in turn turns any dbt project into a "complete BI platform".
It should be noted that Lightdash is both a front-end and a back-end. So for regular business users who may not be familiar with SQL (e.g. marketing or finance), Lightdash serves as the visual layer for dbt, while in the back-end, data analysts and others more technical users can create custom workflows and define all activities. logic for metrics and KPIs, essentially "abstracting the complexity" of how they're all calculated.
"Lightdash is focused on providing tools for data analysts to enable true self-service BI for the rest of their business," said Chaudhary.
Lightdash Dashboard Image Credits: Lightdash
Basics of BIBusiness intelligence, for the uninitiated, is the process of exploring, integrating, and organizing disparate data sets to inform decision-making. Big data insights are the name of the game, helping analysts draw meaningful conclusions, identify and visualize patterns, and predict future outcomes (e.g., sales forecasts).
The BI market is big business, considered a $23 billion industry in 2020 and expected to top $33 billion by 2025. That's probably why Google has given away more $2 billion to acquire Looker in 2020, and Salesforce acquired Tableau for over $15 billion before that.
Lightdash, for its part, serves as the primary gateway for companies looking to explore their data, offering native integrations with many of the tools that make up the modern data stack, from dbt to Snowflake, Airbyte and Fivetran. ..
Lightdash, an open-source business intelligence (BI) platform that sets out to challenge proprietary incumbents such as Looker, officially launches its core business product to the public today today, supported by $8.4 million in funding. The round was led by Accel, with participation from Moonfire, Y Combinator (YC), Snyk Founder Guy Podjarny, and Gitlab CMO Ashley Kramer.
In its original form, Lightdash was known as Hubble when it graduated from YC's S20 bundle, with the goal of helping companies run tests on their data warehouse to identify data quality issues. These data quality metrics, as they turned out, were most useful in BI tools, which co-founder and CEO Hamzah Chaudhary says no BI tool on the market supports. So they pivoted the product to Lightdash and started working on the new project full-time in May 2021 to solve a big problem for data analysts.
"Modern data analysts look more and more like software developers, but they're stuck with enterprise user interfaces that lock down business logic and slow them down," Chaudhary told TechCrunch. "Lightdash provides productivity tools for analysts, allowing them to deploy BI enterprise-wide with much less effort."
Lightdash is specifically designed for dbt, a command line-based data transformation tool that allows analysts to transform raw data in their warehouse using SQL and their usual text editor. Dbt is the "t" in "extract, load, transform (ELT), and Lightdash in turn turns any dbt project into a "complete BI platform".
It should be noted that Lightdash is both a front-end and a back-end. So for regular business users who may not be familiar with SQL (e.g. marketing or finance), Lightdash serves as the visual layer for dbt, while in the back-end, data analysts and others more technical users can create custom workflows and define all activities. logic for metrics and KPIs, essentially "abstracting the complexity" of how they're all calculated.
"Lightdash is focused on providing tools for data analysts to enable true self-service BI for the rest of their business," said Chaudhary.
Lightdash Dashboard Image Credits: Lightdash
Basics of BIBusiness intelligence, for the uninitiated, is the process of exploring, integrating, and organizing disparate data sets to inform decision-making. Big data insights are the name of the game, helping analysts draw meaningful conclusions, identify and visualize patterns, and predict future outcomes (e.g., sales forecasts).
The BI market is big business, considered a $23 billion industry in 2020 and expected to top $33 billion by 2025. That's probably why Google has given away more $2 billion to acquire Looker in 2020, and Salesforce acquired Tableau for over $15 billion before that.
Lightdash, for its part, serves as the primary gateway for companies looking to explore their data, offering native integrations with many of the tools that make up the modern data stack, from dbt to Snowflake, Airbyte and Fivetran. ..
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