Noteable, Collaboration And The Modern Data Stack
We’ve written before about two themes that we believe in strongly. One is the need for every company to adopt a modern data stack, which has driven investments in companies like Startree (real time analytics) and Hightouch (Reverse ETL). The other is that many apps will be re-written around collaboration, such as Felt for mapping or Flux for chip design.
Noteable sits at the intersection of these two trends. It’s an interactive notebook that makes the data in Snowflake or Redshift accessible to everyone, from data scientists to business analysts. Unlike BI products, collaboration is a first-class primitive, enabling data teams to iterate their analysis much more quickly than would otherwise be possible.
Image courtesy of Noteabl
Today, Noteable is announcing its Series A raise led by BCV, with participation from Wing and Costanoa Ventures.
We first met the founders in March 2020, just as the world was shutting down. Despite the uncertainty, we were impressed by their determination and clarity of vision. The four of them — Elijah, Matt, Michelle and Pierre — had built the notebook infrastructure at Netflix and AWS, respectively. At Netflix, their collaborative notebook, centered on Jupyter, attracted hundreds of users. They also contributed to open source projects to improve the notebook experience, such as nteract and papermill.
That experience has informed their vision for Noteable, which is Jupyter-compatible. In particular, it focused their attention on three key areas, based on user feedback:
- More powerful analytics in the notebook: Have it be a place where people can analyze data, not just store work they’ve done elsewhere.
- More powerful visualizations: It’s not enough to get an answer; data teams also need to convince others and effectively “show their work.”
- Collaboration through sharing, comments, annotations, etc.: Feedback cycles are faster than ever before.
It’s early days, but initial feedback has been very encouraging. Even though Noteable is in private beta, many users are spending hours working in the product — and are not shy about giving feedback! If you would like to try it out, you can request access here.