Chartio has raised $2.2 million from Avalon Ventures and added some new features to its data visualization platform that blends data sets and does complex calculations. Chartio had previously raised a $4.4 million Series A round from Avalon in 2011.
With the funding, Chartio will continue to develop its platform for analyzing data sets without the need for building data-warehouse environments.
It has also added two new features to the platform. The company now offers a blending feature that allows users to mix data sets. And it has pre-baked formulas into the Chartio platform that shows information in an Excel spreadsheet that can be simultaneously viewed as a chart.
The blending feature allows users to layer different data sets and then visualize them in a chart. Each layer is a query from a data set and supports all relational databases. With formulas, a user can do their own analysis on a combination of databases that it has joined, for example, with the blending capability.
Chartio is also now offering consulting services for those customers that need additional help getting more out of their data. It’s an unusual move for a startup. Most young companies do not offer consulting, but with analytics it makes some sense. Visualizing analytics is not an easy task, even for the data scientist who works every day to help people make sense of information.
But the challenge with consulting is in what it takes away from product development. Chartio differentiates on its chart creation capability. By offering services, it raises questions, even if the product development is entirely separate from the consulting operation.
The analytic services team is much more closely aligned with support than engineering, said Founder and CEO David Fowler in an email interview. The hope is to feed the knowledge they gain from their customers and feed it back into the product.
“We never want to get into the all-too-typical business-intelligence industry trap of building unique products for each customer on-site,” Fowler said.
Chartio competes with companies like Datahero, GoodData and Birst.