Metabase, An Uber Co-founder’s New Big Data Startup, Raises $13M Posted on : Feb 12 - 2019

This is the first publicly-disclosed funding for the company, which was founded in November 2014 according to Crunchbase. Metabase appears to be one of Expa’s spinout projects. Expa is a startup studio co-founded by Garrett Camp (co-founder of Uber and StumbleUpon) and Roberto Sanabria (former global search lead at Google, director of analytics at StumbleUpon, and senior manager of business analytics at LinkedIn), among a few other folks listed in the About page on Expa’s website.

Camp and Sanabria are two of three executive directors listed on Metabase’s filing. The other is Sameer Al-Sakran, who serves as Metabase’s CEO. The fourth individual listed on the filing is Julia Schottenstein, a principal at NEA.

Metabase (the software) helps its users ask questions with data. In an example in Metabase’s documentation, a business analyst could connect an order database and build a query for all orders over a certain subtotal all through a visual interface. Metabase runs the underlying computations and offers ways to visualize data and share the answers it finds with a team.

As open-source software, its source code is openly available online for free. Metabase makes money by offering a number of professional services like managed hosting, support, and assistance with implementing Metabase in a custom analytics or business intelligence setup. Its business model is in the same spirit as Databricks, which develops custom analytics tooling and a proprietary runtime on top of Apache Spark, another open-source analytics framework. Crunchbase News covered Databricks’s latest round last week. Source