
Data visualization service Reflect raises $2.5M seed round led by DFJ - borisjabes
https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/26/data-visualization-service-reflect-raises-2-5m-seed-round-led-by-dfj/
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skewart
Congrats on the funding. The product looks really appealing.

I'm curious about the typical (expected) use case for something like this. I
would think a lot of large-scale data consumers would already be using an end-
to-end solution that includes at least halfway decent visualization tools -
whether it's Tableau or ELK/Elastic.

Will customers be more likely to be smaller businesses who right now have
limited data viz tools? Or developers who need to make something quick and
dirty and don't want to wade through d3? Or existing customers of major data
platforms who aren't happy with the visualization they provide? Or something
else entirely?

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colbyaley
Thanks!

Great question! We're different than other tools because we're an ingredient
component that developers add to their applications and services (Tableau +
others are standalone tools).

We're working with larger companies, like Simply Measured, who are using
Reflect to power their customer-facing products.

Most companies (large or small) don't have the core competency for data
visualization in-house -- Reflect helps fill that gap.

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njx
How does it compare against Tableau/Qlik/infocaptor ?

Visualization has become commodity, it is what you do to simplify the path
from data to viz is important. [http://infocaptor.com/visualization-
gallery.php](http://infocaptor.com/visualization-gallery.php)

~~~
bradhe
Hey njx! I'm Brad, one of the cofounders of Reflect. We totally agree that a
lot of the front end for visualization has been commoditized (although I'd
argue it still gets misused pretty badly). But building all the infrastructure
to support visualization is still left as "an exercise for the reader" which
is where we come in!

I think that Tableau and Qlik (and QuickSite to a degree!) are great tools and
they've helped make visualization and the infrastructure to do it available to
people who previously didn't have it. We're extending this to any developer on
the planet by using tools we are all familiar with: REST and Javascript. And
since the whole internet wants to interact with visualization we're doing it
at a new level of scale.

Happy to talk through the details with you, my email address is in my profile
--just ping me and we can schedule some time!

~~~
WhitneyLand
>building all the infrastructure

What infrastructure? Some cloud BI solutions let you drop an iframe to
integrate and done. Same is true for the rest apis.

Still not seeing the differentiation, however I honestly wish you success.
Congrats.

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bradleybuda
Congrats to this very talented team; I've had the privilege of seeing a few
early demos and the product is _so easy_ to use without sacrificing power or
richness.

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colbyaley
Thanks for your support!

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radnam
This looks interesting. Would love to try it out..requested an invite.

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doppenhe
Congrats to the reflect team, great to see the journey from TechStars to seed
round.

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bilmeswe
Thanks. We're just getting started!

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vegabook
honestly is this what passes for "data visualization" with these guys? A
weekly stacked area chart?? You've been able to do this in Excel for 30 years.
It worked fine on a 386. Where's the progress here..

Data visualization is about multi-gig, possibly streaming data sets, and
crucially, parsing the data, probably in real time, for the crucial 1-2% of it
that's actually interesting, and helping user find them. Not putting a thin
SASS wrapper on stone age graphics whose underlying data size is probably
measured in kilobytes

This thing looks like a charting service. Not "data visualization".

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infinite8s
Do you have any suggestions for products/tools that can handle multi-gig
streaming datasets?

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vegabook
[https://flink.apache.org/](https://flink.apache.org/)

~~~
infinite8s
Ah sorry I meant from a data viz perspective. But I guess a dataviz solution
that handles multi-gig datasets would need to be integrated end-to-end.

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phonon
Seems kind of similar to
[https://github.com/Polychart](https://github.com/Polychart) (which
unfortunately went defunct)

~~~
michaelbuckbee
That's interesting from the standpoint of their license says "free for non
commercial use" and then "for commercial use see
[https://polychart.com"](https://polychart.com") which errors as like you said
they went out of business.

~~~
phonon
Yeah, you can see an archived version of the site here

[https://web.archive.org/web/20150908004847/https://www.polyc...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150908004847/https://www.polychart.com/)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20150924213349/https://www.polyc...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150924213349/https://www.polychart.com/demo)

(video still works!
[http://play.vidyard.com/aDsHgEC9IPpqN52MfmpsCA.html](http://play.vidyard.com/aDsHgEC9IPpqN52MfmpsCA.html)
) and
[https://web.archive.org/web/20150924213345/https://www.polyc...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150924213345/https://www.polychart.com/license)

and their blog is still up

[http://blog.polychart.com/](http://blog.polychart.com/)

Perhaps the founder would make it MIT/BSD at this point?

Anyone want to tweet at her?
[https://twitter.com/lisaczhang](https://twitter.com/lisaczhang)

Also, for some history...
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5519893](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5519893)

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macandcheese
Nice to see another PDX company get funded, quite a big seed as well!

Curious if you guys use proprietary graphing libraries or wrap something like
d3 in custom skins.

~~~
bilmeswe
We do use D3 under the hood.

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curiousgal
Feeling better about opting for a statistics and data analysis engineering
degree instead of a software engineering one.

~~~
bhollan
As someone who has 2 engineering degrees and just finished a code school, how
can I sell myself _as though_ I had one of those?

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rgbrgb
Looks great. What DBs are supported? Can't find that anywhere in the docs.

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tschellenbach
Whow, great to see a fellow Techstars company ranking on Hnews :)

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unclek
Seems like the UI borrows super heavily from Invision.

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bilmeswe
We're fans of Invision + elements of material design. Some inspiration there
for sure.

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josh_carterPDX
Awesome! Congrats!

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farrahc32
Thanks Josh!

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baradoy
Nice work Reflect!

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dnprock
Congrats guys.

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bradhe
Thanks Phuoc!

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rekoros
Congrats!

