Wojciech Daniło and Sylwia Brodacka had been working in the visual effects industry building tools that Hollywood uses to make computer generated graphics look real. Then a few years ago, they decided to apply that attention to visual details to something that would be useful to even more people.
"In the computer graphics domain, the best thing we can achieve is people's entertainment when we are providing super cool visual effects for movies. It's super cool," Daniło told me. "We can also achieve something more."
So in 2017, they founded Enso, a startup that is creating open source software to help business teams analyze data more quickly.
The company does this by using its own programming language, called Enso, to make the coding process faster, visual and interactive. It also generates and updates the code as a user makes changes.
On Tuesday, Enso launched out of stealth and announced $16.5 million in seed funding from investors including SignalFire, Khosla Ventures, Day One Ventures, Decacorn Capital, Y Combinator, Samsung Next, Harvard’s Endowment, West Coast Endeavors and Innovation Nest.
Daniło and Brodacka co-founded the startup after working together for several years at two different visual effects and industrial simulations companies that Daniło founded: Flowbox and Coddee. Daniło is the CEO and CTO, and Brodacka is CPO.
They named the startup after a Japanese painting style which involves painting a circle in just one or two brush strokes.
It's "a state where your mind is free and you're able to create easily. This is exactly what we are doing, and also if you're growing Enso, then it's a perfect circle," Daniło said. "And then in Enso, a double representation in things which is the code and the visual graph."
Enso's products allow users to pull data into its "engine" from other programming languages like Python, Java, JavaScript and R, and the company says that its platform can run queries up to 80-times faster than Python.
Once a dataset is loaded into Enso's "engine," users can run queries and moves nodules around, and the platform displays all of the connections and results like a visual map.
The flagship code is open source and free. And the company is aiming to launch a subscription-based cloud version in the first quarter of 2023 that will have more advanced features, enhanced security and automation. An on-premise option is also available for customers who need data to be processed locally.
The company is headquartered in San Francisco, and its co-founders are both based in Krakow, Poland, at the moment. They have a team of around 20 people, already more than double from earlier this year, who are distributed across 10 countries.
Over the next year or so, Enso will be focused on building out its products and making the platform even more user-friendly for people who are not software engineers.
