Observable Expands Leadership Role in “Data Collaboration” Category with Strong Business Momentum

Company Announces Significant Growth in Customer Base and Product Capabilities

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Following the recent announcement of Observable’s Series B funding round of $35.6 million, the company today announced continued growth in its customer base and momentum from a strategic partnership with Microsoft. Observable also reported significant growth in key metrics for its product adoption and usage: the company passed half a million monthly active users; this vibrant community is defining the future of data work through collaboration.

Innovative Customers Leverage Observable to Solve Business Needs

Observable customers are uncovering insights and creating business value by collaborating with data in entirely new ways. New customers, including The Marshall Project, UNAVCO, and TriNetX, join the more than 300 organizations currently using Observable, including: Stitch Fix, Trase, Sumitovant Biopharma, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Economist, MIT, and the University of Washington. These organizations are using the Observable platform to transform their data collaboration efforts and companies across all vertical markets are adopting Observable to improve how they work with data for better decision making.

“Iteration is needed to converge at a good idea and without Observable’s framework, I don’t think my design and feedback iteration loop would be fast enough to really work. Being able to say, ‘What do you think?’ and ‘Let’s try again’ fundamentally changes the game,” said Brooks Mershon, Software Engineer at UNAVCO.

“We want to get out of a mindset where you go to the data people and they turn a crank and findings come out, but it inevitably leads to more questions. We really want to have collaborative exploration of data,” said David Eads, Data Editor, The Marshall Project. “We all speak the same language about the data. We all share the same understanding about its limits and strengths. In our environment, having a shared mutual understanding is invaluable.”

Learn more by visiting the Observable Customer Stories page on the company’s website.

Observable Platform Evolves, Further Simplifying Exploratory Data Analysis

Companies know that data is the crux of crucial business decisions, but they lack ways to collaborate, communicate, and act quickly on insights from their data. Organizational barriers, lags in analysis and review, or lack of a common language – there remain huge unaddressed roadblocks in how teams are able to make use of data quickly for better decision making.

Founders Melody Meckfessel, former VP of Engineering at Google, and Mike Bostock, D3.js creator, recognized this gap in the market and are delivering on their vision for Observable by creating a platform for data collaboration to meet this need across industries, in companies large and small.

The Observable team set out to fill this gap by combining their unique areas of expertise to build an entirely new way to collaborate and communicate with data. Observable’s recent strategic partnership with Microsoft Teams reinforced that the future of work depends on data collaboration and implementation of seamless work flows. Observable also powered the Unicode Consortium’s emoji report, a visual representation of what emojis we use most to communicate.

One key innovation to the platform is Observable Plot, which is a simple but highly expressive charting tool that allows teams to put together analytics dashboards that anyone can edit in a few minutes. Observable Plot offers the ability to create data visualizations, such as a line or bar chart, and its concise and memorable API embraces the “grammar of graphics” to give users a rich and flexible vocabulary for collaborative data exploration and insights. The company continues to evolve Observable Plot and some recent feature additions include:

• New and improved marks include images, vectors, arrows, symbols, markers, wrapped text, variable-color lines and areas, and boxplots.
• The addition of sorting scales such as bar charts in descending value order.
• Automatic legends for color, opacity, and symbol scales.
• Improved Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) accessibility.

The Observable platform advancements also make collaborative data work easier for users by now offering:

• Support for SQL cells that lets users connect to a live database, and execute and run SQL queries.
• Team Templates which allow users to create custom templates that can be used by their teammates to quickly get started with data analysis.

About Observable: Observable is the collaborative data canvas built for, and powered by, community. The company was co-founded by Mike Bostock, D3.js creator, and Melody Meckfessel, former VP of Engineering at Google. Observable helps teams at more than 300 organizations such as Stitch Fix, Trase, The Washington Post, and MIT make better business decisions using data. Observable’s core company values include teaching, empathy, and creativity; learn more at https://observablehq.com/.