Melbourne-based startup WhyHive has raised $600,000 in a pre-seed round led by Skalata Ventures and backed by Culture Amp’s Jon Williams, Linktree’s Alex Zaccaria and Up Bank’s Dom Pym.
WhyHive has been working with early adopters in the marketing sector since the beginning of the year, with users making waves by analysing huge volumes of free text in minutes and delivering lightning-fast, beautiful charts.
Dom Pym says:
“[We] invested in WhyHive early days because we believe in their mission. We love that they want to democratise data exploration for everyone, helping elevate the entire ecosystem.”
Users upload data like surveys, product reviews, sales data or spreadsheets to the platform and perform quick and easy analysis with just a few clicks.
The WhyHive team saw how Canva made design more accessible for everyday users and feels the same can happen for data analysis.
Co-founders T Guthrie and Matt Cohen came up with the idea while running a social enterprise data consultancy together.
During their time as consultants, they donated over $220,000 of in-kind services to the nonprofits and social enterprises they worked with.
WhyHive's user-base includes organisations like the ABC, Share the Dignity, as well as individuals like Ally Watson, Founder & CEO of Code Like A Girl, who relies on WhyHive for survey data analysis. Watson describes the platform as “becoming something she can’t live without.”
Other users have reported reducing their analytics time by 80%, with one independent researcher estimating savings of $30,000 per year.
Guthrie and Cohen often get asked about how their product compares to ChatGPT’s data analysis features.
“With ChatGPT, users can’t verify the results are correct unless they can read code, and often spend even longer than they would in Excel trying to get charts that make sense.”
“We’ve taken an alternative route to products like ChatGPT by building our own analytics engine, combining the best of Large Language Models (the AI technology underpinning ChatGPT) with data science logic to produce a much more reliable experience”.
After more than a year in development, WhyHive today opens their product up for free access.
Guthrie and Cohen are also sharing the data from their company fundraise as a sample dataset in the WhyHive app. They hope it can help other first-time founders to raise capital.
“We had no idea what a successful fundraise looked like when we started, so we want to open-source our experience for other founders,”
says Cohen.
Driven to make data analytics accessible to everyone, Guthrie believes that data is power, and they want to help level the playing field.
“We want to see a world where anyone can explore important questions and advocate for their ideas using data.”
Guthrie & Cohen will present at this year’s Human Insights Conference in Sydney on the 29th of August.
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