Vero Analytics gets $550K to simplify prep work for visualizing data

Data scientists have better things to do than clean up data and get it ready to analyze in visualization software. Like a few other startups, Vero Analytics has observed that problem and has cooked up a solution. Now investors have given Vero a $550,000 seed round.

Vero’s software provides a point-and-click interface to give non-technical types a new way to refine a data set into a form that data-visualization tools like Tableau and Qlik can work with.

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It’s the sort of tool that could usher in a democratization of data across companies that have data on hand and more complex visualization software to work with. And it removes data scientists from the equation.

Early users of Vero’s software include Bonobos, IHG, and Netflix.

“They all want to solve this problem of how we enable their business units to collaborate on data sets and allow them to use any visualization tool they want,” Vero chief executive and cofounder Ajo Abraham told VentureBeat.

Prior to starting Vero, Abraham worked with data at PayPal, Google, and, most recently, Netflix. And before all that, he worked at Microstrategy, a longstanding business-intelligence software provider.

Competition could come from later-stage startups with data-preparation capabilities, including Paxata and Trifacta.

One nifty feature that helps Vero stand out: a way for employees to collaborate in order to come up with standards for metrics that will be represented in visualizations. It offers a place where employees can share their own definitions for columns in databases. Then, if someone proposes a change in a definition, Vero sends out notifications, which users can then accept or reject. That way, data stays consistent, and data analysis stays democratic, without the proverbial rug being pulled out from under everyone else.

“We’re able to build this collaborative environment for people to be more efficient with data than they’ve ever been able to be,” Abraham said.

Vero started last year and is based in Washington, D.C.

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Investors in the seed round include LaunchCapital and angel investors whose stature indicates the potential value of Vero’s software. Among the angels are David Lennie, the former director of data science and engineering at Netflix; Rupen Parikh, the former head of business intelligence at Facebook; and David Glueck, the senior director of data science and engineering at Bonobos.