Data dashboards have become an everyday staple, and many companies are creating their own customized tools in this vein or offering them alongside other cloud-based software and data offerings. But that hasn’t stopped one team of entrepreneurs from coming at this market head on with a singular aim of reinvention – turning what many view as just another status indicator into an effective collaboration tool.
Writ, a new San Francisco startup, recently shared exclusive details to VentureBeat of its $3.8 million seed funding round led by Google Gradient Ventures with participation from Defy.vc, High Alpha, Toba Capital and other angel investors.
Adam Weinstein (CEO) and Jason McGhee (CTO), co-founders of Cursor (a data catalog solution acquired by DataRobot in 2019), created Writ as their next venture together.
At its core, Writ’s mission is simple: it provides an AI-enhanced dashboard for companies that addresses all departments within an organization — not only data science or leadership – and offers an accessible log of what decisions were made with their data and the outcomes thereof.
“Over the last several decades, companies have relied heavily on dashboards as one-way communication tools,” according to Weinstein in an interview with VentureBeat. He sees “an increasing interest in providing offerings that go beyond looking at data but actually help move it into decisions”.
The company and its investors believe they have cracked the code with their custom dashboard tool and believe it can be leveraged by data scientists and team leaders, using AI to provide on-demand intelligence graphics faster and across departments/teams; additionally it will maintain an audit trail of actions taken using their data.
“Teams of people responsible for understanding a particular area of data – be it sales and marketing operations teams or finance departments – require tools that allow them to discuss and take appropriate actions,” Weinstein noted.
Both founders have extensive experience from working at notable companies like LinkedIn, Pandora, ExactTarget (now Salesforce) and Deloitte; giving them a deep knowledge of data’s role in modern business practices.
Weinstein detailed how, during his previous job, his role was to inform partners of how their data from parent company was being utilized. For this, he would take screenshots from dashboards, “plop it” into emails, and distribute these to all partners.
