WhyHive Announces $600k Pre-seed Round
The cat’s out of the bag!
T & Matt
In this article:
💰 Announcing our $600k pre-seed raise
📊 WhyHive is now free to use!
🚀 We’re making our raise data public. You can take a look (and explore it for yourself) by signing up to a free account
I’m so excited to announce that we’ve raised $600,000 in an oversubscribed pre-seed round led by Skalata Ventures and backed by Culture Amp’s Jon Williams, Linktree’s Alex Zaccaria and Up Bank’s Dom Pym, among others.
We thought we’d share a bit more with you about our journey getting here and why Matt and I bet our previous business on building ‘Canva for data’.
From 2018-2022, Matt and I ran a social enterprise data consultancy together. I was about a year out of uni and already fairly disillusioned about the inaccessibility of data analytics.
I’d worked in a not-for-profit and saw first-hand how people were trying to use data for super impactful projects, but it was expensive, difficult and unintuitive for most people to work with.
So we got a team together and consulted for awesome corporates, and used the profits to donate over $220k worth of in-kind hours to social impact projects. (more on that story here)
We kept hearing the same thing across the board, from businesses and NFP workers alike: people wanted to analyse their own data but the software was too hard.
So we bet every last dollar from our past consulting work (alongside support from the City of Melbourne & the Telematics Trust), and pivoted.
We saw how Canva made design more accessible for everyday users and felt the same could happen for data analysis.
People who told us they’d spent 3 days trying to learn Tableau just to make basic graphs (to no avail) were now finding insights on their own. With no training. In about 30 seconds.
We knew we were onto something and needed the right people to back us to go to the next step.
Dom Pym (Up Bank), T and Matt refusing to pose for a serious photo shoot
Here’s what Dom — the one at the top of the slide — said about investing in us:
“[We] invested in WhyHive early days because we believe in their mission. We love that they want to democratise data exploration for everyone, helping elevate the entire ecosystem.”
We were really excited to work with investors like Dom because of shared values, as well as his incredible ability to build intuitive UI. In Up’s case, it’s so intuitive that they have the most satisfied customers and are the most trusted bank.
Similarly, Linktree and Culture Amp are known for their incredible UX, and in Linktree’s case particularly, extremely fast time-to-value.
T, Alex Zaccaria (Linktree), and Matt during our 'soft' launch
These topics have been awesome to pick our investors' brains about. And we’re proud that the result is a UI in WhyHive where people feel like they’re “playing”.
One of the things we learnt from our users is how they use ChatGPT, where it works really well and where it falls down.
With ChatGPT, users can’t verify their results are correct unless they can read code, and they often spend even longer than they would in Excel trying to get charts that make sense.
We’ve taken an alternate route to products like ChatGPT by building our own analytics engine, combining the best of Large Language Models (the AI technology underpinning ChatGPT) with data science logic to produce a much more reliable experience.
The crew. Simon, T and Matt
Our dream from the start has been to have a free version of the product that anyone can use. We felt this was the best way to scale our impact as well as get our platform into the hands of as many people as possible.
So today, we’re announcing our Free plan.
We’re also sharing the data from our pre-seed raise as a sample dataset in the WhyHive app. We hope it will help other first-time founders to raise capital.
We had no idea what a successful fund raise looked like when we started, so we want to open-source our experience in case it’s helpful for others to learn from.
If you’re following along our journey and want to help us out, here’s what you can do:
👉 Check out what we’ve built. Sign up, analyse some of your data, and tell us what you think.
👉 Share this blog, tell your mates, bring your colleagues to the app.
Every bit of feedback gets us one step closer to our mission: make the power of data accessible for everyone.
