Reflect raises $2.5 million to be the Twilio of data visualization

Reflect announced that it has raised $2.5 million for its data visualization platform in a seed round led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ). The funding will be used to bring on board employees, including developers, designers, a community manager, marketers, and eventually salespeople.

Although other investors participated, including Founders’ Co-Op, Liquid 2 Ventures, Techstars, Stanford University, and notable angel investors, 80 percent of the round came from DFJ. As a result, partner Bill Bryant is said to be taking a board seat, while the founding CEO of Jive Software, Dave Hersh, becomes an independent member.

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A graduate of Techstars’ Seattle program in 2016, Reflect specializes in providing developers quick visualizations to embed into their applications. With its software, users can configure dashboards, reports, and graphical views of their data without needing to deal with any complex infrastructure and libraries. The company sees itself as doing what Twilio does with cloud communications — as offering a platform for data visualization.

“Companies are spending millions of dollars and wasting years building infrastructure, APIs, and entire front-ends to visualize data for their teams and customers,” explained Reflect CEO Alex Bilmes. “Data visualization isn’t a core competency for most companies, nor should it be. Today, they are forced to hire teams of experts — designers, developers, product managers, and data scientists — to get things done. With Reflect, all it takes is a simple API.”

The funding by DFJ is notable, since the firm was also an early investor in Twilio, which could indicate that it sees billion-dollar potential in Reflect. Bryant addressed this indirectly: “Through our experience with Twilio, and more recently, other portfolio companies like Mapbox, Chef, and CircleCI, we’ve seen first-hand that developers are quickly migrating to ‘composing’ applications from a curated, vetted set of robust, highly performant APIs, components, and micro services that deliver a particular piece of needed functionality, as a service.”

Since the launch of its private beta, Reflect said more than 1,000 companies have requested access to its platform, including Microsoft, Simply Measured, Tune, and Barracuda.