Enso is a no-code alternative to analyzing complex data sets.It’ raised $16.5 million from Y Combinator, Khosla, and SignalFire, and is emerging from stealth.The startup wants to target advanced Excel users as “the WordPress for software.” A Y Combinator startup that is trying to turn one of the toughest data analysis processes into a simple flowchart has raised $16.5 million.
Enso is effectively trying to create a visual flowchart experience on top of a complex data integration and analysis problem called an ETL pipeline (short for “Extract, Transform, Load”).Data engineers build ETL pipelines to connect disparate data sources and clean them up, making them actually usable in data analysis instead of an unstructured set of gobbledygook.
The company is coming out of stealth today, with SignalFire, Khosla Ventures, Y Combinator, and others participating in the seed funding round.
Enso is one of a class of companies that call themselves “no-code” startups.In Enso’s case, it’s trying to simplify what would traditionally require a lot of more advanced skills in SQL or Python.In this case, it would help analysts who have less experience with those or other languages achieve the same results and lower the barrier to entry for the field.
Those pipelines include tools like Fivetran and dbt, which help import data from disparate sources in some coherent form that analyts can work with.
Enso is the step that comes after that.Users can pull in a large data set, which could be a massive Microsoft Excel file or something from an outside data source.
From there, they define functions they’d like to run on that data, like taking the sum of a certain column in that Excel file or producing some kind of chart or focusing on a small subset of that data.
Giants in the data analysis space including Databricks and Snowflake are making their own push into covering different parts of the machine learning process , such as tools for cleaning data, analysis, and deploying machine learning models.Each of those generally requires some expertise in machine learning and analytics.
Enso’s approach tries to reduce the complex parts of that analysis into a more easy-to-understand language.Instead of writing complex queries or needing to understand advanced programming languages, Enso has its own shorthand dictionary that’s designed to be more intuitive.Instead of a series of lines of codes to import data from a website, Enso wants users to just type “get from HTTP,” co-founder by Wojciech Danilo said.
However, it isn’t designed to displace existing products if they’re already in use — and it shouldn’t, Danilo said.Enso is designed for advanced analysis beyond what a dashboard like Tableau can offer, such as determining whether the data is accurate in the first place.Tableau, which Salesforce acquired for $15.7 billion in 2019 , is considered a standard in the data visualization space.
“If you just have a data set, want to visualize it, and Tableau provides you with what you need, there is no need to reach out to Enso or any other product,” Danilo said.But Enso is equipped with a more powerful data visualization engine with a lot of ways of presenting data that aren’t found in Tableau, he said.
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