Analytics startup Mode raises $7.5M and adds support for multiple charts in each report

Mode, a startup which has built a cloud service that data analysts can use to query and run reports on data, announced today a $7.5 million funding round. The startup is also introducing new features, including the ability to include multiple charts and explanatory text in each report.

“One of our goals is to make analysts as efficient as possible and make their lives as easy as possible,” Mode cofounder and chief executive Derek Steer told VentureBeat in an interview. “We want them to be able to do that work in the place where they’re actually doing this work.”

Hence the new ability to throw many charts into each report and effectively tell a story in Mode — which happens to be where you can get at the data and make further iterative queries. Mode has the potential, then, to be a place where multiple people collaborate.

Mode currently looks more like a Jupyter notebook that a data scientist might use to work in and then get an instant visualization from. But Jupyter notebook reports can often feel more like a long story than an edited presentation. “Instead of showing you the most important thing first, it shows you the first thing I did first,” Steer said.

And besides the customizable user interface — the ability to move a chart up or down with the click of a button — Mode focuses on the needs of data analysts who ask questions of data with the commonly used SQL query language, not data scientists who typically use languages like R and Python.

Mode today is also adding integrations with the Snowflake cloud data warehouse, the Presto open-source SQL query engine, and Windows server support, as well as offering single sign-on and HIPAA compliance. And soon Mode will provide auto-complete support when you start typing in a column in the SQL query editor.

To date, Mode has raised $10.5 million, including the $2 million round from last year.

Foundation Capital led the new round in Mode. Existing investors Goldcrest Capital and Arnold Capital also participated.

Mode started in 2013 and is based in San Francisco, with 18 employees. Customers include Clover Health, Lyft, Thumbtack, and Zenefits. Companies now run more than 20,000 SQL queries a day on Mode, the startup said in a statement.

Hundreds of people are now using Mode in a number of companies, said Steer, who was previously an early member of the analytics team at Yammer, which Microsoft bought in 2012.