Chartcube IPO is very successful as business users get addicted to collaborating with data on mobile

Business Press

1 April 2019

Chartcube’s IPO has been one of the anticipated ones this year and has surpassed all expectations. They priced the IPO at $31 per share and it grew by 60% to $50 on the first day of trading. Chartcube offers tools for the business users to analyze data, tell their stories, engage their team in a discussion and make decisions. Chartcube has created a new paradigm for browsing through charts on mobile devices. Middle managers, who spend up to 30% of their time reviewing, sharing and discussing data as a part of their job, love Chartcube.

Chartcube is amongst the first of a new breed of enterprise applications that have been built focusing on the “business consumer”. Personal apps have reimagined the user experience for creating, sharing and engaging in every aspect of people’s lives from photos to messaging. Chartcube set out to reimagine the experience of data collaboration. “People have got used to a new paradigm for sharing, reviewing and collaboration in their personal lives. For instance, the way people share photos is very different than 10 years ago,” said Pankaj Tibrewal, founder of Chartcube.

People have historically used either Excel or Powerpoint to share data. Data shared in Excel has no narrative and receiver is left to spend time and draw his own inferences. It is like a map with no directions. A PowerPoint deck has a fixed story. It it reminiscent of printing turn by turn maps from MapQuest years ago. Chartcube saw the need for a completely flexible tool that would allow users to share stories where the receivers are able to “see” data in a new way that was much better suited to small touch screens.

The market for data on mobile has been fiercely targeted by companies in the business intelligence space but the idea of dashboards has been an unfulfilled dream for more than a decade. The reason has been that the implementation and configuration of these tools took much longer than the dynamic nature of data based decisions. As the BI tools got better in the last few years, the use of data became even more dynamic and the data sources infinitely more fragmented. On the other hand, there have also been companies that have innovated on ways business users collaborate. Chartcube was the first company to see the opportunity in the intersection of analytics and collaboration on mobile.

Tibrewal, started his career as a technology entrepreneur but went to work in big business post an MBA. He saw how various users in a variety of companies in different countries user data for decision making as a McKinsey consultant. He directly lived this pain running a retail chain. Deepak Alur, co-founder of Chartcube, has worked for many year at Sun and eBay and was leading engineering at JackBe (acquired by Software AG). He was sold when he saw an early prototype and could imagine how it would change the business world. “For many decades people have been limited to SQL queries that would result in tabular data that Excel can handle. I was excited about how Charcube could free users from that limitation and see much richer data to make decisions on the go,” said Deepak.

Chartcube joins the success of many companies that has created a mobile first product recognizing the change is work and lifestyle of people. People have been sacrificing functionality for the convenience. Paper has become a favorite tool for non-artists and artists alike. Quip, created by the former CTO of Facebook, has become the preferred word processor. Flipboard is now the favorite window for various content. Haiku Deck is another example of resonating with tablet users for creation of simple decks. The BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) movement has led to the BYOA (Bring Your Own Apps) movement and has made it easy for companies to penetrate enterprises. The CIOs and other decision makers find investing in these apps an easy decision when they see their employees already benefitting from using these apps.

Chartcube is available on the desktop, laptops, tablets and smartphones. The desktop version has some  added features and the smartphone version a few less features than the tablet version. While the use is close to “analysis” on the desktop, the use on a smartphone is purely review and commenting. Chartcube started with Excel sheets as inputs but quickly built adapters to SaaS services and ERP systems. “Export to Chartcube” is becoming as ubiquitous as “Export to Excel”.

Open a Salesforce report and you see a cube. First, you want to see how your business did by seeing various metrics at a high level. You can intuitively do this by swiping and turning the cube from right to left. Second, you want to see various “cuts” of the important metrics. You can see those by swiping the cube up down. Finally, you want to drill down into areas of largest gaps or opportunities. You double tap a region, and you go inside the cube to another cube which shows you data about all the countries. You double tap on a country and you see the city with the lowest sales growth. Now that you have figured out the problem area, you turn the cube horizontally and vertically to understand this problem area. Chartcube spent a lot of time on design before building anything so that they could copy the business users’ mental model into an experience that is very addictive.

Chatcube successfully applied the new social paradigm to visual data. User can add comments to charts as if they were adding comments to photos in a photo album. Tap on the share icon and you can share a set of charts with a narrative. Team members who receive a link can play with the data, follow your “story” and engage in a conversation, all on a small touch screen.

There are a plethora of companies that are taking small slices of the analytics market and trying to create tools that users can use directly to make decisions. This includes big data analytic companies where people are are acting on insights based on data that they never could analyze before. These  tools are beginning to break into businesses with specific solutions. The sources of data are proliferating in companies. The need for consumption of data to make decisions is getting larger and going deeper into the organization structure. Chartcube has an opportunity to capture the sweetest part of the market that BI and business productivity tools have been trying to serve for two decades… the “last mile” that touches of 100s of millions of business users.

Chartcube’s founding angel investors include Amar Goel, Paresh Patel and Rahul Sood. Shasta Ventures saw the potential early on and invested $5m back in 2014. Shasta Ventures and ABC Ventures invested another $20m in 2016.