Lightdash takes on Looker with an open source BI platform built for dbt

▤ Summary

Lightdash, an open source business intelligence (BI) platform thats setting out to challenge proprietary incumbents such as Looker, is officially launching its core commercial product to the public today backed by $8.4 million in funding. The seed round was led by Accel, with participation from Moonfire, Y Combinator (YC), Snyk founder Guy Podjarny, and Gitlab CMO Ashley Kramer.In its original guise, Lightdash was known as Hubble when it graduated from YCs S20 batch, with a focus on helping companies run tests on their data warehouse to identify issues with data quality. So for regular business users who might not be conversant in SQL (e.g. marketing or finance), Lightdash serves as the visual layer for dbt, while in the back-end data analysts and other more technical users can build custom workflows and define all the business logics for metrics and KPIs, essentially abstracting the complexity away of how theyre all calculated.Lightdash is focused on giving data analysts tools to enable true self-serve BI for the rest of their company, Chaudhary said.Business intelligence, for the uninitiated, is the process of mining, integrating and organizing disparate data sets to inform decision making. It also means they can start off small-scale by deploying Lightdash to just one or two teams to test-drive it before expanding further into their stack if they like what they see.This is much more efficient compared to proprietary BI tools where you often have to go through a lengthy sales and procurement process before you get hands-on with the product itself, Chaudhary said. For a lot of enterprises and startups alike, this is the preferred method to get started with new tools it has the added benefit that being open source, its already built to deploy on-premise if needed, which is often a requirement for large enterprises.This is a model that has yielded success for so many startups before it: an open source foundation for organizations that need full control and flexibility, with a commercial layer that removes much of the complexity and spadework for those that need it.A quick peek across the competitive landscape reveals a few other players in the commercial open source BI space, including Metabase, which raised a $30 million tranche of funding last year, and Preset, which raised around $36 million to commercialize the Apache Superset project.

▦ Linked Companies

Metabase

$1M to $5M