Early-stage companies often have trouble dealing with the amount of data that can run through the organization, especially as it grows. Large sums are spent on data software, dislocated data, dealing with data pipelines. All of which involve data warehousing, cleaning tools and a visualization platform.
Count is a startup that is an attempt to create an all-in-one data platform to deal with this problem, providing early-stage teams with tools to build data pipelines more cheaply.
It’s also coming out of stealth mode and announcing a $2.4m fund-raise led by LocalGlobe, with participation from Global Founders Capital . Its angel investors include Charlie Songhurst, the former head of corporate strategy at Microsoft .
The company was founded in 2016 by former management consultant Oliver Hughes and Imperial College physicist Oliver Pike, who identified that companies weren’t able to make data-driven decisions because of the complexity of standard data software and the technical and design constraints accepted by the industry.
In a statement, Hughes described the problem they are addressing: “The teams making the most progress were having to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, across separate solutions, to help them get their data under control and it was taking them up to 12-18 months to purchase and implement it all. So many startups get locked into long term contracts with tools that are no longer suitable for them. Count has a simple pay-as-you-go model so teams can start using the platform for free and only pay more as their team and data grow.”
Remus Brett, Partner at LocalGlobe, said: “Most people know that data is incredibly important but the ability to take it and tell stories with it still remains difficult. Now more than ever, we see the value in being able to process and analyze data at speed, to help us make critical decisions. Count makes it possible for even very early stage companies to begin making decisions based on analysis of their data.”
Edd Read, CTO at Tiney.co which uses count said: “Count has given us a way to pull all our data together and build reports for the whole team,” said. “Notebooks are a powerful way for us to share insights in context and give the team the ability to query data without having to learn SQL.”
Count competes with a number of different solutions including Data warehouses such as Snowflake; Data cleaning tools like DBT; and analytics platforms like Looker.