At Explo, our mission is to change how companies share data with their customers. In 2020, we started redefining how companies can build customer-facing dashboards, and since then, we’ve empowered companies to more effectively share data faster and easier than ever before. This is the first of many steps we’re taking to lead the customer-facing analytics space and enable secure and flexible data sharing between a company and external parties.

With that, we have two exciting announcements:

(1) Our team is thrilled to announce Explo has raised a $12M Series A led by Craft Ventures, alongside Felicis Ventures and Amplo VC. Additionally, we’ve brought on some amazing founders and executives from Notion, Doordash, dbt, Lyft, and more to support us on our journey.

(2) We’ve officially released Explo’s self-serve platform. Designed for developers to quickly create a workspace, integrate data sources, build white-label dashboards, and embed them directly into their app or a custom web portal. Additionally, we’re offering a 14-day free trial to use the platform without restrictions.

Why Customer-Facing Analytics

Companies have always needed to share data with their customers. This is one of the ways they can differentiate themselves from competitors and unlock new revenue-generating opportunities.

Historically this sharing has come in a few static forms (like physical mail and email). However, modern customers now expect a more dynamic and custom experience. Further, the data must always be available and accessible from any platform. 

Dashboards have become the most effective solution to meet these expectations, providing access to real-time information and the flexibility to visualize the data that matters most.

Doing this requires designer and developer proficiency, skill sets that can be difficult to source in-house. Additionally, if customer-facing analytics is not a business's core competency, the effort can distract developers from product roadmap priorities.

This is where Explo can help.

Here are a few examples from our customers:

• Virtual events platforms need to report how many attendees showed up and how many “pamphlets” were picked up at an event
• Billing infrastructure solutions need to show how much money they’re processing every hour (or minute)
• Moving business platforms need to communicate to drivers how much tip they’ve earned so far that week and how it compares to previous weeks

Why Explo for Customer-Facing Analytics

Explo’s platform puts low-code capabilities into the hands of developers to overcome three common challenges in this space: accessing, visualizing, and sharing data.

Access

Explo connects directly to relational databases and data warehouses. In fact, our platform is compatible with single-tenant, multi-tenant, and hybrid database structures. Some of our customers have one data source connected, and others have hundreds. Fortunately, being SOC 2 Type 2 accredited and HIPAA compliant has allowed us to work with customers in the finance and healthcare industries who have extremely strict data residency requirements.

Visualize

The drag-and-drop dashboard editor interface provides a rich set of 30+ components that make it easy to build any possible dashboard. Our custom styles feature provides a UI on top of CSS, allowing any user (technical or not) to easily configure the dashboard’s design to fit into any design system. Explo is designed to be fully white-labeled and seamlessly embedded.

Share

Sharing is our bread and butter – and sets us apart from other solutions. Explo dashboards can be embedded into our customer’s products and can also be shared out via email, white-labeled customer portals, password-protected share links, and more. This is just the tip of the iceberg as we continue to empower companies to easily share data with external parties.

Explo's Differentiator

When you think of the data analytics space, products like Looker, Tableau, Metabase, Sisense, and Mode most likely come to mind. However, the reason why Explo is categorically different from these products comes down to our core engineering focus on external-facing use cases, while those products were all engineered for internal use cases.

What does this mean? Explo is built for a different end-user (our customer's customer), and our roadmap is fundamentally different. Our products will continue to diverge more and more as time goes on — a few distinguishing pillars include security, design, end-user experience, and performance. 

Why are legacy internal BI solutions the wrong tool for embedding dashboards in your application or web portal? These solutions lack capabilities for properly embedding into an application, are not designed for multi-device or platform responsiveness, and can't support localization use cases (currency and date formats) on a per end-user basis. Trying to use a BI solution that has been designed and built specifically for internal data sharing is using the wrong tool for the job.

The Next Chapter

We’re paving the way in this emerging customer-facing analytics space, but our vision is clear. Our investments in engineering features like connecting to APIs and noSQL data sources, advanced visualization and control components, sharing via 3rd parties (Slack and SMS), data source writeback, and much much more will continue to unlock the full potential of customer-facing analytics and the customers we serve.

‎‎A huge thank you to our team, customers, and investors who’ve supported us throughout this journey and helped us become the leader in customer-facing analytics. Now, let’s get back to work.

Interested?

Build With Us

We’re a small but mighty team tackling some very exciting problems. Expect to move fast and have lots of ownership. Interested in learning more about what it’s like to work at Explo? Check out our Explo 101 page and our open roles on our careers page. Apply or reach out directly to recruiting@explo.co, we’d love to chat!

Get Access to Explo

Think you have a great use case for Explo? Sign up for our self-serve product and get started immediately. You can also schedule a demo if you want to chat directly with someone on the Explo team.