Melbourne-based data analysis startup WhyHive has raised $600,000 in a pre-seed round led by Skalata Ventures and backed by Culture Amp’s Jon Williams, Linktree’s Alex Zaccaria and Up Bank’s Dom Pym.
WhyHive has been working with early adopters in the marketing sector since the beginning of the year, with users making waves by analysing huge volumes of free text in minutes and delivering lightning-fast, beautiful charts.
“[We] invested in WhyHive early days because we believe in their mission,” said Pym.
“We love that they want to democratise data exploration for everyone, helping elevate the entire ecosystem.”
Users upload data such as surveys, product reviews, sales data, and spreadsheets to the platform and perform quick and easy analyses with just a few clicks.
The WhyHive team said that they aim to emulate Canva’s mission to make designing accessible, only with data.
Co-founders T Guthrie and Matt Cohen came up with the idea while running a social enterprise data consultancy together. Guthrie won the Women Leading Tech Data Science award in 2022.
WhyHive’s user base includes organisations such as the ABC, Share the Dignity, and individuals including Ally Watson, founder and CEO of Code Like A Girl and fellow Women Leading Tech Award winner. Watson said the platform is “becoming something she can’t live without.”
Other users have reported reducing their analytics time by 80 per cent, with one independent researcher estimating savings of $30,000 per year.
Guthrie and Cohen often get asked about how their product compares to ChatGPT’s data analysis features.
“With ChatGPT, users can’t verify the results are correct unless they can read code, and often spend even longer than they would in Excel trying to get charts that make sense.”
“We’ve taken an alternative route to products like ChatGPT by building our own analytics engine, combining the best of Large Language Models (the AI technology underpinning ChatGPT) with data science logic to produce a much more reliable experience”.
After more than a year in development, WhyHive today opens its product up for free access.
Guthrie and Cohen are also sharing the data from their company fundraising as a sample dataset in the WhyHive app. They hope it can help other first-time founders to raise capital.
“We had no idea what a successful fundraiser looked like when we started, so we want to open-source our experience for other founders,” said Cohen.
Driven to make data analytics accessible to everyone, Guthrie believes that data is power, and they want to help level the playing field.
“We want to see a world where anyone can explore important questions and advocate for their ideas using data.”
