These days, every modern organization has ambitions to be “data-driven,” and ensure that all their key business decisions are backed by data. Tracking and learning from data is crucial for identifying what’s going well, what isn’t, and adapting accordingly for maximum growth. However, this is easier said than done.

One of the key challenges is the disconnect between data teams – who are responsible for setting up and maintaining a scalable stack for ongoing visibility into accurate, clean data – and the business teams, who are the end data consumers, responsible for calling the shots on business decisions. Data teams who handle the majority of the data process (ETL integration, warehousing, etc.) usually have technical/SQL expertise, while business teams don’t. By business users, we’re referring to VPs of Growth, CMOs, CROs, Heads of Sales, and others.

More often than not, this results in a high dependency on data teams for every dashboard and report. When this happens, not only do data teams manually spend time building out dashboards like a support team, they become a bottleneck for analytics getting out to the business in a timely manner, which can be detrimental to company growth. Business users need to have a consistent pulse on what’s going on in the business.

Whaly is tackling this problem head-on with its self-service business intelligence platform that empowers data teams to grow data adoption among business users. Whaly allows companies to make better decisions and drive revenue by reducing the amount of time from raw data to insight, and by removing data teams as a bottleneck for analytics. Playing in the same BI space as Looker and Metabase, Whaly prides itself on ease-of-use and fast implementation, so that small and medium businesses can get going quickly.

The Platform

Whaly has 2 bespoke tools in its BI platform that are highly in sync:

• The Workbench is dedicated for data teams, in which they’re equipped with all the tools they need to create derived tables, models, the semantic layer, and implement business logic – essentially, setting the business teams up for successful data exploration. In the Workbench, Whaly offers a SQL builder or a visual Flow option.
• Business teams have their own Workspace tool in which they can explore their company’s data, answer their own questions, and run their own queries autonomously – in a familiar and intuitive drag & drop experience that doesn’t require code. This user-friendly interface enables business teams to unlock their own insights, and customize their own visualizations.

The clear separation of boundaries also ensures high data governance, preventing business teams from breaking company data. In addition, Whaly offers a range of ETL connectors included with the BI platform, so that customers can get started on their data projects quickly and easily.

With adoption and company-wide trust in data as Whaly’s main mission, they also have Embed & Push functionalities that allow flexibility in where/how you share your dashboards once they’re created in Whaly.

Company Story

Whaly was founded in January 2021 out of a real pain point that their three co-founders Emilien Sanchez, Pierre de Poulpiquet, and Florian Buguet identified when they were working together at their previous company – a customer data platform for French media and retail companies. In their former roles, they saw first-hand how difficult it was to execute their data projects quickly without the help of software engineers.

This made data adoption across “data-driven” companies a real challenge. Business teams that needed answers were underserved, and ended up manually finding workarounds, like spreadsheets. Clearly, something was broken in this process. That’s when they started working on the solution – a business intelligence platform that everyone is empowered to use and benefit from.

Since Whaly’s founding in 2021, it has had an impressive journey:

• Enrolled in Y Combinator’s S21 batch
• Entered Station F in Paris, the world’s biggest startup campus
• Raised a seed round of $1.9 million from Red Alpine, Kima Ventures, Y Comabintor, and others in July 2022
• Whaly is now used by 40+ customers in 6 countries. Companies like Career Karma, Zefir, Not So Dark, and Talk use Whaly to leverage data more efficiently to drive their business forward.

They’re just at the beginning of their journey to help companies grow data adoption through self-service capabilities – empowering to unlock actionable insights from data faster and easier.