Visual.ly, the team built from the infographics team behind Mint’s spectacular infographics, has raised $2 million in seed funding, led by Crosslink Capital, SoftTech and 500 Startups as well as angels Kapor Capital, Giza Ventures, Naval Ravikant, Mark Goines, Josh James and others.
According to its financing release, Visual.ly has had 26K users sign up to be a part its beta (coming soon), over 300K infographics created, received over one million pageviews monthly to its website and has doubled the number of indexed infographics it hosts since it demoed in April.
Pre-beta launch the company has already partnered up with media companies like The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, AskMen, CNNMoney, GOOD, The Economist, NASDAQ, Skype, National Geographic, Wall Street Journal to provide their infographics and data visualizations solutions.
“We are defining a new space — allowing users to create sexy, high impact data visualizations,” says co-founder Stew Langille. “Right now there are some companies in the business intelligence space like Palantir, Tableau, and Many Eyes from IBM. We approach the market from a different angle but some may see them as potential competitors.”
Langille wants to use the money to build up Visual.ly’s development team as well as stock up on data visualization specialists. Visual.ly plans on launching its beta within the year, and publicly shortly afterwards. Because the world totally needs more infographics.