Airtable Inc., the $5.77 billion startup behind the popular productivity platform of the same name, today announced that it has bought data visualization specialist Bayes Technologies Inc. in its first acquisition since its launch.

The deal’s financial terms were not made public. Bayes, which founded in 2019, has raised an unspecified amount of funding from Y Combinator and Amplify Partners.

Airtable provides a popular cloud service that enables workers to create spreadsheets, or “bases” as the startup calls them, for organizing business data. What sets Airtable apart from similar products such as Excel is that spreadsheets created in its service can contain not only text and numbers but also a range of other elements. Those elements may include file attachments, checkboxes, graphs and other types of content assets. 

A software team, for example, can use Airtable to create a base that lists outstanding development tasks and displays a progress bar next to each task showing how much of the work has been completed. A marketing department, in turn, might have a base for managing ad campaigns that contains embedded copies of its advertising materials along with detailed information on each item.

Airtable provides a set of features for visualizing information that users keep in its platform. Customers can turn their base into timelines, maps and task boards. The acquisition of Bayes and its data visualization software will enable Airtable to provide customers with yet more ways of presenting information.

Bayes has developed a no-code cloud service that analyzes the data a user is looking to visualize and automatically suggests suitable graph templates. According to the startup, this feature saves time by removing the need for workers to manually select a data visualization approach. Users can create multiple graphs about the same topic using Bayes’ automation feature and organize them in a single dashboard for easy viewing.

After a dashboard is created, it often has to be modified to reflect changes to the underlying data. For example, if a company creates a visualization of the most recent quarter’s revenue figures, the visualization must be refreshed every quarter to reflect the latest earnings results. Bayes offers capabilities that automate parts of the process to free up users for other tasks.

Alongside data visualization, automation is another area in which Airtable has been investing as part of its product roadmap. The startup enables users to create automatic workflows to perform tasks such as notifying developers when the spreadsheet containing software feature requests is updated with a new entry.

Airtable received a $5.77 billion valuation in March, when it closed a $270 million round of funding. That round gave Airtable resources to make additional strategic acquisitions if it so chooses. Acquisitions help software companies accelerate their product roadmaps because buying an existing product is often faster than building a new one from scratch.  

Image: Airtable