Transform Data Inc., an analytics startup led by former Airbnb Inc. software engineers, launched from stealth mode on Thursday with $24.5 million in initial funding.

The startup raised the capital over two rounds that were both jointly led by noted venture capital firms Index Ventures and Redpoint Ventures. 

Transform has built an analytics platform that enables companies to gain insights into their business, such as how many new customers signed up in the last 30 days and what items they bought. The platform helps uncover business insights by extracting so-called metrics about a company’s operations. In the context of enterprise analytics projects, a metric is a relatively simple data point that describes a specific aspect of a company’s day-to-day activities, such as the number of products sold per day or annual revenues.

Such data lends itself well to business intelligence initiatives because it’s fairly easy to work with. For example, capturing a store’s daily sales every day over the course of three months enables analysts to calculate the total amount of revenue the store generates per quarter.

But though metrics can be relatively easy to analyze, they’re not always easy to obtain. The information in a company’s business applications often isn’t organized into metrics by default but is rather scattered across customer purchase logs, invoices and other business records.

Transform’s platform provides features that enable analysts to extract metrics from raw business records. Transform users create a metric by coding a metric definition that defines what data they wish to extract, from what systems and how. For example, to obtain daily store revenues, an analyst could create a definition that finds customer purchase logs in the company’s sales database, adds up the value of the purchases and then delivers the sum in the form of a single revenue figure.

Metrics-related code can add up in large companies that process hundreds or thousands of metrics as part of internal analytics projects. To make organizing the code easier, Transform provides a catalog that enables analytics teams to keep all their metric definitions in one place.

The startup says that this centralization eases analytics teams’ work in multiple ways. Through the centralized interface, users can quickly bring up the code of a metric definition to check that the data they’re receiving is accurate and evaluate ways of improving the code.

The third major component of Transform’s platform is the Metrics API. It provides the ability to load metrics from Transform into external applications for further processing. A company’s marketing department may wish to load ad performance metrics into their advertising campaign monitoring tool, while the business intelligence team can export store sales metrics to a data visualization service. 

“Just as the average person just wants to turn the light on, the average business user just wants a trusted metric for revenue,” explained Index Partners principal Bryan Offutt. “They don’t need to know how it was calculated, but they do need to be right. They need to understand how to properly use it, and they need to understand who to call if it breaks.”

Image: Transform