Business intelligence software startup Preset Inc. today announced that it has raised $35.9 million in funding from existing backer Andreessen Horowitz and new investor Redpoint Ventures, which led the round.

The round follows a $12.5 million Series A investment in 2019.

Preset provides a paid cloud version of Apache Superset, an open-source business intelligence platform for creating data visualizations that was developed by founder and Chief Executive Officer Maxime Beauchemin. Superset is used by thousands of organizations worldwide. Beauchemin also created another popular open-source project, Apache Airflow, that enterprises use to coordinate the transfer of data among their internal systems.

Superset, and the cloud version that Preset has created based on the platform, are designed to function as the go-to data visualization platform for all of a company’s employees. Superset enables nontechnical workers to turn business data into charts through a graphical interface. More savvy users, in turn, have access to a SQL query editor that enables them to create visualizations with fine-grained customizations. 

Superset also provides features for exploring business information. After visualizing their data, users can look for patterns of interest. For example, in a chart that displays a company’s sales figures from the last six months, business analysts could isolate the most recent quarter to identify whether revenue increased or decreased compared with the preceding quarter.

A key feature of Superset is that it can visualize information from a large variety of sources. The platform can pull records from relational databases, cloud-native data warehouses such as Snowflake, data lakes, real-time analytics tools and even spreadsheets. 

Preset sees the platform’s third-party product compatibility as a major selling point. It’s increasingly common for companies to have multiple data analytics teams that each use their own separate set of systems to store and analyze information.

Moreover, organizations regularly modernize their analytics infrastructure by bringing new tools into the mix. As a result, Preset says, effectively visualizing a company’s data requires a visualization tool that works well with the large and ever-changing assortment of data management products used by its employees.

“We believe that the data stack of the future is a complex ecosystem of products and services that are specialized on different verticals, that integrate seamlessly together,” Beauchemin wrote in a blog post today. “In that world, Superset is the data consumption layer, and Preset is the fully integrated, managed service offering around it.”

The fact that companies’ data is often spread across different products and services is also influencing the development roadmaps of much larger market players. Google LLC, for example, last year introduced BigQuery Omni to let customers analyze information they store in competing cloud platforms.

Preset’s cloud version of Superset, which it calls Preset Cloud, is a managed service with additional features not included in the open-source version. There are cybersecurity controls that companies can use to regulate access to data they’re visualizing. Preset also offers the ability to create multiple, separate data visualization workbenches, which is useful for enterprises where several different teams use Preset Cloud. 

With the new funding, Preset plans to expand the capabilities of both Preset Cloud and the open-source Superset platform. The startup launched the cloud service into general availability today in conjunction with its funding news.

Preset has raised $48.4 million since launching in 2019. It’s one of several new startups that have emerged in recent years to commercialize open-source data analytics technologies. 

This month, Ahana Cloud Inc. announced that it had raised $20 million to help it commercialize the open-source Presto distributed query engine. Presto makes it possible to run analytics queries quickly on datasets stored across multiple systems. Earlier, StarTree Inc. secured a $24 million investment to build a commercial version of the Apache Pinot platform for large-scale data analytics.

The funding rounds shows that, though the data management and analytics markets are quite crowded, investors see an opportunity for new players to carve out a niche. Moreover, investors appear to have particularly high hopes for startups whose products are based on open-source technologies. 

Image: Preset