Why We Raised $12M to Reimagine Business Dashboards

Business dashboards, despite their critical role in monitoring metrics related to revenue, user behavior, and application performance, are often difficult to build, maintain, and use due to outdated tools and workflows. Rill, a company founded from technology spun out of Snap, has addressed this issue with its fast and flexible dashboards that are preferred by business users over more complex BI tools. The company recently raised $12 million to develop Rill Developer, a free open-source tool designed to simplify the transformation of data into business-ready metrics, enabling analysts to build usable dashboards efficiently. Rill's approach diverges from traditional BI tools by integrating an in-memory OLAP engine that allows for rapid data aggregation, reducing data footprint and costs while ensuring fast dashboard performance. Unlike traditional BI tools that require multiple steps and programming languages, Rill Developer facilitates the entire data-to-dashboard process with just SQL, providing a consistent user experience and empowering analysts to make updates confidently. Rill's focus is not on complex ETL pipelines but rather on enabling analysts to work with structured data already present in warehouses or data lakes. The company's recent funding round includes a diverse group of institutional and angel investors, aiming to expand Rill's market presence in real-time data applications.