Behind the Investment: Metabase – The Digital Nervous System of The Modern Enterprise

While accelerated sharply by the pandemic, digital transformation was already well on its way to fundamentally refactoring how businesses of all sizes function globally. At the core of this increasingly critical transformation is the generation of useful, timely insights. Hundreds of billions of dollars in enterprise value have accrued to companies that enable their customers to generate (see Amplitude), stream (look no further than Confluent), and process (e.g. Snowflake valued at $82B+) data, but there is still a chasm between all that  data and the ability for employees across the company to put this data to use. While businesses are increasingly leveraging data to inform decisions, the source of these insights tends to be siloed in warehouses, databases or stuck in excel, and therefore inaccessible to the majority of a company’s employees or customers. This gap between data and insights — in addition to the relatively slow time to value and lack of user-friendly functionality — is often why existing data visualization and business intelligence tools fail to garner sustained adoption across the enterprise.

It is in bridging the aforementioned chasm that Metabase enters the picture and ultimately shines. As a developer-led and truly self-service business intelligence tool, Metabase becomes organizations’ central nervous system for data and insights. The product quickly serves stakeholders' business intelligence needs across a variety of business functions and levels of technical acumen. The magic that is the Metabase user experience was encapsulated well by one customer, who described the product as “…a world-class chef's knife in a kitchen, a great tool for almost any job."  The product's addressability has catalyzed strong open source adoption, clearly evident in the project’s 100M+ downloads and 25k+ Github stars. Time and time again Metabase's product-led growth creates a powerful flywheel: developers use the OSS to create an initial set of queries, then spread usership and query volumes to achieve critical mass within a company, such that an enterprise license goes from a nice-to-have to mission critical.

Due to Metabase's ease of use, ten-employee SMBs can pick it up and see value in minutes while simultaneously being used by top tier, sophisticated technology organizations including Confluent, Datadog, and Bill.com just to name a few. Business intelligence is not a new problem, but Metabase brings a differentiated and user-friendly approach to a large, growing, and increasingly important end-market.

At Insight, we were incredibly impressed by the company's ability to leverage a uniquely product-led growth approach to both generate early commercial adoption and grow end-usership within customers’ organizations over time. At the helm of all of this is a necessarily product-obsessed co-founder, Sameer Al-Sakran. We first got to know Sameer in early 2021 and were immediately blown away by his and the team's thoughtfulness when it came to building out the core operating system for turning data into actionable insights, coupled with a relentless focus on end-user functionality.

We're proud to officially announce our partnership with Metabase and are grateful for the opportunity to lead their $30M Series B with participation from existing investors NEA and Expa. This is just the start of our exciting journey together, and we look forward to building the BI platform for modern enterprises alongside this rockstar team.

Alex Glaubach Senior Associate More By The Author