On January 13, 2022, Observable raised a $35.6 million Series round led by Menlo Ventures with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital and Acrew Capital. This round increases the total amount raised by Observable to $46.1 million. Observable is interesting to the enterprise analytics community because it provides a platform to help data users to collaborate throughout the data workflow of data discovery, analysis, and visualization.
Traditionally, data discovery, contextualization, analytics, and visualization can potentially be supported by different solutions within an organization. This complexity is multiplied by the variety of data sources and platforms that have to be supported and the number of people who need to be involved at each stage which leads to an unwieldy number of handoffs, the potential issue of using the wrong tool for the wrong job, and an extended development process that results from the inability for multiple people to simultaneously work on creating a better version of the truth. Observable provides a single solution to help data users to connect, analyze, and display data along with a library of data visualizations that help provide guidance on potentially new ways to present data.
From a business perspective, one of the biggest challenges of business intelligence and analytics has traditionally been the inability to engage relevant stakeholders to share and contextualize data for business decisions. The 2020s are going to be a decade of consolidation for analytics where enterprises have to make thousands of data sources available and contextualized. Businesses have to bridge the gaps between business intelligence and artificial intelligence, which are mainly associated with the human aspects of data: departmental and vertical context, categorization, decision intelligence, and merging business logic with analytic workflows.
This is where the opportunity lies for Observable in allowing the smartest people across all aspects of the business to translate, annotate, and augment a breadth of data sources into directional and contextualized decisions while using the head start of visualizations and analytic processes that have been shared by a community of over five million users. And then by allowing users to share these insights across all relevant applications and websites, these insights can drive decisions in all relevant places by bringing insights to the users.
Observable goes to market with a freemium model that allows companies to try out Observable for free and then to add editors at tiers of $12/user/month and $40/user/month (pricing as of January 13, 2022). This level of pricing makes Observable relatively easy to try out.
Amalgam Insights currently recommends Observable for enterprises and organizations with three or more data analysts, data scientists, and developers who are collaboratively working on complex data workflows that lead to production-grade visualization. Although it can be more generally used for building analytic workflows collaboratively, Observable provides one of the most seamless and connected collaborative experiences for creating and managing complex visualizations that Amalgam Insights has seen.