Data visualization service Reflect raises $2.5M seed round led by DFJ | Hacker News Reader

Data visualization service Reflect raises $2.5M seed round led by DFJ

techcrunch.com

83 pointsborisjabes34 comments

Congrats on the funding. The product looks really appealing.

I'm curious about the typical (expected) use case for something like this. I would think a lot of large-scale data consumers would already be using an end-to-end solution that includes at least halfway decent visualization tools - whether it's Tableau or ELK/Elastic.

Will customers be more likely to be smaller businesses who right now have limited data viz tools? Or developers who need to make something quick and dirty and don't want to wade through d3? Or existing customers of major data platforms who aren't happy with the visualization they provide? Or something else entirely?

Thanks!

Great question! We're different than other tools because we're an ingredient component that developers add to their applications and services (Tableau + others are standalone tools).

We're working with larger companies, like Simply Measured, who are using Reflect to power their customer-facing products.

Most companies (large or small) don't have the core competency for data visualization in-house -- Reflect helps fill that gap.

How does it compare against Tableau/Qlik/infocaptor ?

Visualization has become commodity, it is what you do to simplify the path from data to viz is important. http://infocaptor.com/visualization-gallery.php

Hey njx! I'm Brad, one of the cofounders of Reflect. We totally agree that a lot of the front end for visualization has been commoditized (although I'd argue it still gets misused pretty badly). But building all the infrastructure to support visualization is still left as "an exercise for the reader" which is where we come in!

I think that Tableau and Qlik (and QuickSite to a degree!) are great tools and they've helped make visualization and the infrastructure to do it available to people who previously didn't have it. We're extending this to any developer on the planet by using tools we are all familiar with: REST and Javascript. And since the whole internet wants to interact with visualization we're doing it at a new level of scale.

Happy to talk through the details with you, my email address is in my profile--just ping me and we can schedule some time!

>building all the infrastructure

What infrastructure? Some cloud BI solutions let you drop an iframe to integrate and done. Same is true for the rest apis.

Still not seeing the differentiation, however I honestly wish you success. Congrats.

What kind of infrastructure are you talking? Do you mean storing data?

Congratulations on the launch.

Congrats to this very talented team; I've had the privilege of seeing a few early demos and the product is so easy to use without sacrificing power or richness.

Thanks for your support!

This looks interesting. Would love to try it out..requested an invite.

Congrats to the reflect team, great to see the journey from TechStars to seed round.

Thanks. We're just getting started!

honestly is this what passes for "data visualization" with these guys? A weekly stacked area chart?? You've been able to do this in Excel for 30 years. It worked fine on a 386. Where's the progress here..

Data visualization is about multi-gig, possibly streaming data sets, and crucially, parsing the data, probably in real time, for the crucial 1-2% of it that's actually interesting, and helping user find them. Not putting a thin SASS wrapper on stone age graphics whose underlying data size is probably measured in kilobytes

This thing looks like a charting service. Not "data visualization".

Do you have any suggestions for products/tools that can handle multi-gig streaming datasets?

https://flink.apache.org/

Ah sorry I meant from a data viz perspective. But I guess a dataviz solution that handles multi-gig datasets would need to be integrated end-to-end.

Seems kind of similar to https://github.com/Polychart (which unfortunately went defunct)

That's interesting from the standpoint of their license says "free for non commercial use" and then "for commercial use see https://polychart.com" which errors as like you said they went out of business.

Yeah, you can see an archived version of the site here

https://web.archive.org/web/20150908004847/https://www.polyc...

https://web.archive.org/web/20150924213349/https://www.polyc...

(video still works! http://play.vidyard.com/aDsHgEC9IPpqN52MfmpsCA.html ) and https://web.archive.org/web/20150924213345/https://www.polyc...

and their blog is still up

http://blog.polychart.com/

Perhaps the founder would make it MIT/BSD at this point?

Anyone want to tweet at her? https://twitter.com/lisaczhang

Also, for some history... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5519893

Hey phonon, I'm one of the cofounders at Reflect. Were you a Polychart user? Let me know if you'd like to compare Reflect to Polychart and I can get you in to kick the tires.

I played with their demos a bit, but we use nvd3 now. (We also can't use an offsite service for this...) Thanks for the offer though!

Nice to see another PDX company get funded, quite a big seed as well!

Curious if you guys use proprietary graphing libraries or wrap something like d3 in custom skins.

We do use D3 under the hood.

Feeling better about opting for a statistics and data analysis engineering degree instead of a software engineering one.

As someone who has 2 engineering degrees and just finished a code school, how can I sell myself as though I had one of those?

Looks great. What DBs are supported? Can't find that anywhere in the docs.

Whow, great to see a fellow Techstars company ranking on Hnews :)

Seems like the UI borrows super heavily from Invision.

We're fans of Invision + elements of material design. Some inspiration there for sure.

Awesome! Congrats!

Thanks Josh!

Nice work Reflect!

Congrats guys.

Thanks Phuoc!

Congrats!

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