Transform Raises $24.5M to Revolutionize Data Querying

The Rise of Metrics Stores: Transform's $24.5M Funding

Major technology corporations have invested significant resources in developing tools and platforms for their data science teams. These resources aim to extract valuable insights and metrics from the large volumes of data generated by their operations. Understanding company performance, feature effectiveness, identifying system failures, and analyzing sales trends are all achievable with effective data analysis.

Now, a startup founded by three former Big Tech data professionals is introducing a “metrics store.” This platform is designed to empower businesses lacking the internal resources to build similar tools from scratch, enabling them to leverage metrics for informed decision-making.

Introducing Transform: A Single Source of Truth

Transform is officially launching today, backed by substantial early-stage funding. This investment signals both investor confidence in the founding team and recognition of a market need for a centralized “single source of truth for business data.”

The company has secured a Series A funding round of $20 million, alongside a previous seed round of $4.5 million. Both rounds were led by Index Ventures and Redpoint Ventures. The seed round also included investments from numerous angel investors, including Elad Gil of Color Genomics, Lenny Rachitsky of Airbnb, and Cristina Cordova of Notion.

Transform’s core innovation lies in its metrics engine. This engine can be applied to a company’s structured data, offering functionality comparable to the internal tools developed by large technology companies, but accessible to a wider range of organizations.

The platform can process both data from data warehouses and real-time data streams, generating insights and analytics related to various company actions. Transform is designed to be accessible to non-technical users who regularly work with data, according to Handel.

From Airbnb to Transform: The Founding Story

The idea for Transform originated with Nick Handel, James Mayfield, and Paul Yang – the company’s CEO, COO, and software engineer, respectively. They previously collaborated at Airbnb, with Mayfield and Yang also having worked together at Facebook.

During their time at Airbnb, they observed the potential of data in driving product decisions, measuring usage, and planning future features. They also recognized the challenges of effectively harnessing data and ensuring consistent interpretation across teams.

“Tech companies are increasingly focused on testing every feature and iteration. To support this, we built a tool at Airbnb that allowed defining and tracking key metrics to understand experiment results,” Handel explained. “However, we also needed to understand broader trends, such as search volume for listings, instant booking rates, and customer service interactions.” This tool, known as Minerva, was tailored to Airbnb’s specific data needs.

“By centralizing metric definitions, the data engineering team could handle calculations, providing reliable data to data scientists for deeper analysis, freeing them from repetitive calculations,” Handel continued. This platform served as inspiration for the creation of Transform.

Addressing a Market Gap

However, not all companies possess the resources to develop such specialized tools internally.

“Several companies offer solutions in the metrics space, including LinkedIn, Airbnb, and Uber. These organizations have invested heavily in metrics infrastructure. But only those with dedicated teams of engineers and designers can build these tools in-house,” Mayfield stated. “We believe there’s a significant opportunity to provide this capability to organizations that lack those resources.”

Furthermore, metrics have become increasingly crucial for informed decision-making in product design and overall business strategy.

The industry has shifted away from the “move fast and break things” approach, embracing the principle that “If you can’t measure it, you can’t move it,” as Mayfield put it.

Transform’s Core Principles

Handel outlined three key priorities guiding Transform’s development.

First, the platform promotes collective ownership of metrics by establishing a unified framework for measurement and identification. This ensures consistent understanding and usage across the organization. Second, Transform streamlines the data team’s workflow by automating repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus on in-depth analysis. Finally, it provides APIs for embedding metric-extraction tools into other applications, such as business intelligence platforms.

These principles are embodied in Transform’s three initial products: Metrics Framework, Metrics Catalog, and Metrics API.

Early Traction and Future Plans

Although publicly launching today, Transform has already been working with a select group of beta customers. This early engagement has validated the platform’s functionality and effectiveness. The funding will be used to further develop the product, expand the team, and onboard additional businesses.

Investors express strong confidence in Transform’s potential.

“Transform is addressing a critical industry need. Similar to our early investment in Looker for its innovative approach to business intelligence, Transform takes it a step further by providing a streamlined single source of truth for metrics,” said Tomasz Tunguz, MD at Redpoint Ventures.

“Companies worldwide struggle to make sense of vast data sources and convert them into actionable, trusted metrics. We invested in Transform because they’ve developed an elegant solution to this problem that will fundamentally change how companies approach their data,” added Shardul Shah, a partner at Index Ventures.