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Data dashboards are a dime a dozen these days, and many companies are rushing to make their own custom tools in this vein or bundle them with other cloud-based software and data offerings. But that’s not stopping one team of entrepreneurs from approaching the market head on with a singular focus of reinvention, turning what many treat as a complicated status indicator into a more powerful collaboration tool.
Writ, a new San Francisco-based startup, has exclusively revealed to VentureBeat a $3.8 million seed funding round led by Google’s Gradient Ventures, with participation from Defy.vc, High Alpha, Toba Capital, and other angel investors.
Founded by Adam Weinstein (CEO) and Jason McGhee (CTO), Writ emerges from the duo’s previous venture, Cursor, a data catalog solution acquired by DataRobot in 2019.
Writ’s vision at its core is simple: a dashboard for the AI-infused era — one that speaks proactively to all departments of a company, not just data science or leadership, and provides a trackable record of what decisions the company made with the data, and the outcomes of said decisions.
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“Over the last several decades, companies have been focused on dashboards, which we think of as a one-way-communication tool,” said Weinstein in an interview with VentureBeat. “There’s a lot of interest in this problem of how do you relate data and business teams closer together and provide an offering that doesn’t just look at data, but lets you go from data to decision.”
The company and its investors believe they have cracked the code and that their custom dashboard tool can be leveraged by existing data scientists and team leaders, using AI to provide more intelligent insights and graphics on-demand, faster, automatically and across multiple departments and teams, and most importantly, a persistent record of the actions taken with the data.
“There are teams of people tasked with understanding a given area of data, whether it’s sales or marketing ops team or a finance team, and there aren’t really tools to help them discuss and take action,” Weinstein added.
A strong track record from experienced founders
Both founders bring a rich history of experience from renowned companies such as LinkedIn, Pandora, ExactTarget (now Salesforce), and Deloitte, ensuring a deep understanding of data’s role in modern business practices.
Weinstein explained how at a previous job, his role was to keep partners informed of how the data they were allowed to access from the parent company was being used. He would take a screenshot of a dashboard, “plop it into an email” and send the email around to the partners.
While this worked as a means of keeping partners informed, it failed utterly at providing a good home to see how that information was being used, and at showing a record of what decisions were taken when.
“There’ll be a whole series of emails and discussions to make any sort of change or around something that was of interest, and then the next thing to get started,” Weinstein said. “And so if you ever wanted to go back and figure out what happened, you’d basically be searching in inbox.”
Writ aims to do better, understanding the past and what data has been used for within an organization, by which roles, and which departments.
“What can you do there?” McGhee said. “What can you allow analysts to do when they have some of this monitoring?”
Already, Writ is collaborating with partners and thought leaders to hone the core functionalities of their product.
GenAI backbone with privacy and security in mind
Though Writ is hinging its success on using large language models (LLMs) and generative AI to power its intelligent dashboard products, it is not looking to train or launch its own models at this stage, preferring to use leading off-the-shelf models — noting that the horse race between them is tight, constantly changing, and new models are being released nearly weekly by competing providers.
“We’re not currently planning on spending a bunch of money on compute to try to make a magical model,” McGhee told VentureBeat. “We’re focusing on UX and addressing design partner kind of requests and needs and you know, what they’re really looking to do.”
Yet Writ’s founding team understands the need for organizations to preserve data privacy and security, and as such, won’t be passing on any customer data to third-parties, nor training on it, instead using “metadata” and representational data when it is needing to be passed to outside parties, and only using local or virtual private inferences of LLMs to work with customer data.
Beta launching soon
A beta program, set to launch later this year, will further expand access to its innovative tools. Interested parties can sign-up to apply now at writ.so.
Supporting this vision, Darian Shirazi, General Partner at Gradient Ventures, and Bob Rosin, General Partner at Defy.vc, both expressed their enthusiasm for Writ’s potential to redefine data interaction landscapes.
Shirazi noted the messy, disorganized nature of customer data as a significant challenge for companies, one that Writ’s platform addresses by enabling real-time data ingestion and interpretation.
This development marks a significant milestone not only for Writ but also for the broader landscape of data-driven decision making, highlighting the growing importance of sophisticated data tools in today’s competitive business environment.