Giant beachballs, racing suits and a mobile man-size robot catch your eye at the Reston headquarters of Zoomdata. It makes perfect sense to have so many visual delights for a company that build visualization tools for data analytics.
"I think of it like there's the 1 percent who understand data leaving the 99 percent behind who don't," said Zoomdata CEO and founder Justin Langseth. "What we do brings everyone along in being able to use data analytics."
Zoomdata has been offering businesses and organizations a way to see data in ways more useful than a spreadsheet since it was founded in 2012. Its software offers real-time and historical explorations of data streams, integrating multiple sources into a cohesive whole. This makes the analytics far more accessible than they are in raw form, and allows a layperson to better understand what the numbers are saying without needing a degree in mathematics or statistics.
"It's not the first product to ever show data, but it's scalable and offers more interaction than anything else out there," Langseth said, comparing Zoomdata's product to other data visualization tools like Tableau and Qlik. "It's a generation or more ahead of what else is on the market."
"It's a generation or more ahead of what else is on the market"
Zoomdata has attracted plenty of interest in its visualization of data. Its clients include private companies and parts of the federal government like the Library of Congress, where it's helping make the mostly invisible data held by the Library available in ways useful to researchers and the general public. The company raised $17 million last October in a round led by Accel partner, and has raised $22.2 million total.
"We don't want to be pigeon-holed as a government tech company at all," Langseth said. "The problems they have are similar to a Wall Street bank and our software can help one as much as the other."
Langseth attributes the success of Zoomdata to the rise of data analytics for the masses. He compared it to the invention of Web browser. The Internet had been around, and popular with people already involved in computer science well before that point. But it wasn't until the Web browser came out and became popular in the 1990's that it became accessible and useful to people without any training in computers, including all of the companies that rely on the Internet today. Data analytics is going through the same kind of revolution of usefulness, in part due to the visualization tools that companies like Zoomdata offer.
"It's all moving very fast now," Langseth said. "Staying on the cutting edge is really important. We're on our third data core engine in three years."
"(Zoomdata) lets anyone be a data scientist."
The company is expanding quickly, almost tripling in staff in the last year and with many open spots for new hires to keep up with the demand. Continuing to build its staff and working on the next upgrade will keep Zoomdata moving quickly, Langseth said. And many companies are keen to explore the possibilities that come with spreading data analysis tasks to a wider circle than just statisticians and data experts.
"The tools are easy for regular people to use," Langseth said. "They let anyone be a data scientist.
