Imagine a tool that’s a kind of Facebook for data inside large organizations. You could build data projects and teams, upload and share data sets, then discuss your raw data and findings with colleagues in a community setting. That’s precisely what Data.world, an Austin startup, released today.
Data is the lifeblood of most modern organizations and Data.world has tried to build a tool that combines data with a social network. It provides a place where a community of users with varying levels of ability and understanding can work together on data sets and models.
“What we set out to solve is that we are living in networked age, but data is a highly disconnected thing. A lot of data in the world is sitting inside silos and is hard to understand when you do find it,” Brett Hurt, CEO and co-founder at Data.world told TechCrunch. Hurt and his co-founders saw data that was disconnected from tool chains, and they believed that was contributing to a massive loss in productivity.
The company built Data.world originally as an open community, but also saw a need for private communities inside large organizations where data scientists and data analysts were often separated from one another.”We felt this was the right time to launch the enterprise offering. We’ve built the best collaborative data features to allow [users] to work in a social fashion and bring the power of people to data,” he explained.
They created the enterprise product to connect the people inside an organization who were interested in data and needed a way to collaborate around it using common tools that data geeks use. To that end, Data.world’s enterprise edition connects with Tableau, Microsoft Excel and Power BI, IBM SPSS, MicroStrategy, Google Data Studio, as well as R and Python and even IFTTT.
Among the customers using the enterprise platform is AP, the news syndicate, which has been using Data.world to share data with its various newsroom member organizations to help reporters use data more effectively to enhance their articles.
The company also announced that former Chief Data Scientist for the US government in the Obama administration, DJ Patil, would be joining the company’s Board of Advisors. Data.world launched in 2015 and has raised almost $33 million across two rounds. Its most round was an $18.7 million Series B in 2017.
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