Einblick Analytics Inc., a startup spun out of MIT and Brown University, today launched from stealth mode with a “visual data computing platform” that it says can give enterprise analytics projects a boost.

Einblick has raised $6 million in seed funding from Amplify Partners, Flybridge and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.’s Next venture capital arm to help spread the word about its platform. The startup has an initial customer base that includes the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a luxury carmaker and an unnamed global internet provider.

Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Einblick’s platform provides a virtual canvas on which users can project data visualizations. An analyst could, for example, create a graph of their company’s latest quarterly sales figures and display it next to a bar chart showing customer retention rates. Einblick shows data visualizations inside separate boxes (pictured) that users can drag around the virtual canvas and organize in various configurations.

Einblick’s platform serves as more than just an interface for displaying visualizations. It also provides the data preparation features and other tools that analysts need to create graphs from raw business records, along with a built-in machine learning engine. According to the startup, the machine learning engine can generate custom neural networks trained on users’ own data to help with analytics tasks such as forecasting customer demand.

The startup says that its platform is based on more than six years of research at MIT and Brown. The research was partially funded by DARPA’s Information Innovation Office as part of its Data Driven Discovery of Models program, which aims to achieve “at least 10x improvement in enabling decision makers to predict behaviors and answer what-if questions,” according to DARPA program manager Joshua Elliott.

With the $6 million in initial funding provided by its seed investors, Einblick plans to accelerate sales efforts and hire more engineers to help with future development. The startup believes that its platform could be useful for many different types of companies. “With Einblick’s visual data computing platform, business analysts and data scientists in organizations of all sizes can analyze past data, build predictive models and simulate scenarios,” said Einblick Chief Executive Officer Tim Kraska. 

Photo: Einblick