Data visualization and analytics platform Preset takes in $35.9M

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San Mateo, California-based analytics data platform Preset today announced that it raised $35.9 million in series B funding led by Redpoint Ventures, which had participation from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). The closure of the round coincides with the launch of the company’s fully managed cloud service from beta, and it brings Preset’s total raised to $48.4 million.

Most enterprises have to wrangle countless data buckets, some of which inevitably become underused or forgotten. A Forrester survey found that between 60% and 73% of all data within corporations is never analyzed for insights or larger trends. The opportunity cost of this unused data is substantial, with a Veritas report pegging it at $3.3 trillion by 2020.

Preset aims to combat data stagnation with an exploration platform that enables core business intelligence and analytics. Using Preset, companies can perform ad hoc data visualization and dashboarding via a no-code interface or through sequel query language (SQL). The platform also offers visualization on top of existing data sources, as well as real-time analysis across a range of use cases.

Preset was founded in 2018 by Maxime Beauchemin, the creator of Apache Superset and Airflow. The company’s platform is a managed service on top of Superset, with Preset taking care of enterprise hosting, security, compliance, and governance needs as well as features like integrated single sign-on and role-based access control.

“Preset is focused on offering solutions on the data consumption and visualization layer, and on integrating well with the best in breed solutions in the modern data stack that teams are using and migrating towards today,” Beauchemin told VentureBeat via email. “We believe that the data stack of the future is a complex ecosystem of products and services that are specialized on different verticals, that integrate seamlessly together. In that world, Superset is the data consumption layer, and Preset is the fully integrated, managed service offering around it.”

Superset

Superset, a big data analytics app designed to scale to petabyte-sized datasets, started as a hackathon project Beauchemin started while he was working at Airbnb. It allows users to visualize and analyze data on top of sources like Snowflake, BigQuery, Druid, Presto, and Redshift through a simple interface.

Superset entered the Apache Incubator program in 2017 and graduated in 2021, becoming a top-level project at Apache. Since then, the project has seen contributions from Lyft and Dropbox and become one of the most popular open source intelligence platforms, with users at Airbnb, American Express, Netflix, Twitter, and thousands of other organizations.

Beauchemin believes that Preset is at the convergence of three mega-trends: open source, data, and software-as-a-service. According to Verified Market Research, the global data visualization tools market is expected to climb from $5.36 billion to $11.79 billion by 2028, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 10.40%.

“[Our cloud service] provides organizations with all of the features of Superset plus the advantage of a fully managed cloud service, offering both self-service and freemium pricing options, a disruptive motion in the business intelligence space,” he said. “With the pandemic, we have actually seen increased interest in Superset and in self-service analytics in the cloud. As more data moves to the cloud, we have seen demand for a modern cloud business intelligence offering.”

To Superset, Preset adds dashboards and visualizations that can be created without writing code as well as an SQL editor to build semantic data models, define dimensions and metrics, and create virtual datasets. The platform also hosts 40 out-of-the-box visualization types to showcase different types of enterprise data, in addition to connectors for nearly any “SQL-speaking” data source.

Beauchemin says that Preset is in the pre-revenue stage after six months in private beta, but it has a group of early paying customers including Sony Funimation and AllTrails. According to Funimation COO Rahul Purini, Preset allowed the company to “modernize” their data culture by centralizing reporting and analytics.

“Visibility into our metrics is key to our success in the anime space and with our fans. [Preset] makes those insights accessible to everyone in our organization so users are empowered to ask their own questions and get to the answers with a quick few steps,” Purini said in a statement.

Preset currently has 40 employees and plans to grow to around 70 by the end of the year, focused on engineering, product, and go-to-market hires.

“This latest investment will be applied towards growing our team and supporting our software-as-a-service offering … It will allow us to continue to build a highly secure and scalable multitenant cloud platform to deliver the Superset service and support free and enterprise users,” Beauchemin said. “With the launch of [our paid service] and freemium tier, we make it easier and more secure for anyone to adopt Superset in the cloud.”