Ellie.ai, a Finnish startup that develops product design and collaboration software for data teams, announced Thursday that it has raised €2.5 million, about $2.7 million USD, in a seed funding round co-led by Newion and Crowberry Capital.

Product and data teams can use Ellie.ai’s software to model complex data models and structures to better understand information relationships, such as database models that are needed for running business applications. Its software uses visual modeling to help teams collaborate together to produce high-quality relational and consistent structural models that can be implemented quickly as business logic blueprints.

“You can think of Ellie as ‘Figma for data teams,’ an easy collaboration platform, but designed specifically for large-scale data initiatives,” said Hannu Järvi, co-founder and consumer success officer of Ellie.ai.

Ellie.ai provides a number of tools designed to simplify the process of building and creating data structures necessary for business application design. These include template-based brainstorming, integrations with data workflow tools, import and export and accommodating multiple users simultaneously. The platform is cloud-native and runs in the browser so teams can use it anywhere.

Enterprise users can maintain their own business terminology and entities using a Business Glossary and track metadata to keep complex concepts simple while tracking relationships across models. This also allows linking entities to logical models and the visual design makes understanding business structures more.

The idea, according to Ellie.ai, is to provide an interface that demystifies the data landscape for users and makes it easy to understand and work on together from a greater perspective so that the individual elements can be handled and teased out. As a result, the users’ needs are put ahead of the technical nuts and bolts, which are handled by the platform.

“If we look at the Modern Data Stack, there are hundreds of tools to help you automate, build, and document your data architecture,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Johannes Hovi. “Despite this, the percentage of data projects that provide a clear return on investment hasn’t changed. People get lost in their complex data tools and stacks.”

Ellie.ai allows users to discover insights across numerous stacks for both data teams and business intelligence personnel. For business intelligence it can be connected to software such as Power BI, Looker and Tableau to build powerful business analytics, and for data teams it can integrate with Collibra, Datavault Builder and SqlDBM.

Image: Production Perig