Argo nabs $1.5M to help any employee — not just data scientists — tap into company data

Data science has increasingly been helping companies make business decisions, though most tools are still only useable by the highly technical “data scientists” some are fortunate enough to employ.

But Argo — formerly called Arktos — a stealthy startup that attracted Accel Partners’ Ping Li’s attention before it even had a product, wants to take down that technical barrier. And today, Argo is announcing it has raised just over $1.5 million in funding from Accel Partners and others.

Argo is building a “a data analytics tool that’s made for everyone” and that’s heavy on collaboration between teammates, cofounder Ari Dyckovsky said in an interview with VentureBeat. While he declined to reveal too much about the software, he said Argo is enterprise-grade software built for teams, and it lets them perform core data science functions like data aggregation, visualization, and analysis without needing technical skills.

“You don’t need to know a language other than your own,” he said.

Though Argo will use both customers’ internal data and data from the outside, all of it will come from cloud service providers Argo is partnering with. This isn’t a tool for looking at mortality rates or other publicly available data, Dyckovsky said. Teams will use Argo to “ask questions about their data from cloud services for making smarter, data-driven decisions,” he said.

Accel Partners led the round, with Chuck Moran, Adam Ross, Brad Katsuyama, Kevin Mahaffey, Kathy Olsen, Ryan Simonetti, and Steve Loughlin also participating. It will use the new funds for hiring and developing its product.

Argo was founded in March 2014 by Ari Dyckovsky, Ryan Atallah, and Andrew Vigneault, and is based in Palo Alto, California.