Grid, a Reykjavík, Iceland-based startup building a cloud tool for visualizing spreadsheet data, today said it has closed a $12 million funding round from prominent U.S. investors.

New Enterprise Associates led the round with the participation of Slack Technologies Inc.’s Slack Fund. They were joined by BlueYard Capital, Acequia Capital and other “strategic” backers Grid hasn’t named.

Grid’s namesake service enables business users without any specialized data visualization know-how to turn their spreadsheets into interactive charts. Putting together a chart can take as little as a few minutes, the startup claims. Users import a spreadsheet into the service, choose which data fields they want to visualize and select a chart in Grid’s graphical editor.

“There’s a gap in self-service business intelligence,” Grid co-founder and Chief Executive Hjalmar Gislason told SiliconANGLE in an interview while wearing a company T-shirt that read, “Spreadsheets run the world.” “It takes awhile for people to get to know the tools and get up to speed. Ordinary people use spreadsheets. There’s quite a gap between the two.”

The service was born from market research conducted Gislason, a serial entrepreneur and former vice president at data visualization giant Qlik International AB. Gislason (left, second row) joined Qlik after DataMarket, a previous startup he had established, was bought by the company in 2014. Grid’s other co-founder, Thorsteinn Gudmundsson, served as DataMarket’s vice president of operations. 

Besides just visualizing data, the startup also enables users to make their charts interactive by adding navigation widgets. A financial analyst building a visualization of their company’s sales over the last five years could add a widget that lets the viewer jump to a specific year. Or, the chart could include a slider that enables the viewer to run thought experiments with different product prices to see how they would affect revenue.

“You can create a beautiful interactive narrative on top of your spreadsheet,” Gislason said.

Grid enables multiple graphs to be combined into so-called documents, the startup’s version of a dashboard. Grid documents work on a range of devices and stay synced with the underlying spreadsheet on which they’re based. This means that if a user updates a revenue spreadsheet with sales data from the company’s latest quarter, the changes show up in the graph.

Grid has been testing its service in a private beta program since November and opened the public beta Monday. It will use the new $12 million round to bring it to market. The startup also plans to scale up its development operations, with a longer-term goal of making the product into more of a collaboration tool for teams on top of the current focus on empowering individuals.

Grid is entering a crowded field. A number of other startups offer data visualization tools for nontechnical business users, most notably Airtable developer Formagrid Inc., which is reportedly looking to raise funding at a valuation as high as $4 billion. Coda from Panic Inc. as well as Notion Labs Inc. are also in the general vicinity, though Gislason characterized them as creating entirely new services that require buy-in and learning rather than supplementing spreadsheets most people already know how to use.

There are also the more traditional business intelligence tools such as Tableau, in which NEA was an original investor, that target power users. But Gislason said Grid’s offering is aimed more squarely at knowledge workers who use spreadsheets.

“Spreadsheets are the most widely used programming language in the world,” even if most people don’t think of it as programming, said Forest Baskett, a general partner at NEA. “This doesn’t require you to learn something new. It’s just something that makes your spreadsheets more powerful and allows you to share them with colleagues.”

With reporting from Robert Hof

Images: Grid