From photography to no code data analytics, Graphext raises $4.6 million

Madrid-based no-code data analytics platform Graphext has raised $4.6 million in a seed funding round led by Hoxton Ventures. The round also drew the participation of SaxeCap and Trajectory Ventures and is aimed at further accelerating the startup’s growth, namely by the continued development of its technological offer, and that of a recruitment drive.

The term “no code” has been an industry buzzword for a while now, but the process itself actually stems back to as early as 1985 when Microsoft released the first edition of Excel (written for Mac, ironically) and allowed users to compile and extract data without the need for any coding.

For better or worse, some businesses and industries are still running off this rather primitive method, but if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? For certain, this is true to an extent, but we’ve come quite a way since 1985, and today dashboards and notebooks are seemingly omnipresent.

But to Graphext co-founders Victoriano Izquierdo and Miguel Cantón Cortés these advancements are fine and dandy, but what they’ve been working on will, “enable people that are not doing advanced analytics, to do advanced analytics.”

“I love data science. I studied computer science at university to do data science. When I was a teenager, in high school I was building websites with Miguel for local SMB’s. I handled the front end, and he worked on the backend,” explained Izquierdo. “For the end result, you need photos, a nice design, etc., so a designer grew inside of me. And a photographer.

I started taking pictures on the street. I discovered the Magnum photo agency, started collaborating with agencies in the UK and Germany, and saved €30,000 by the time I was 18.

The way I see it, if you want to use Adobe Photoshop or Premiere, for example, it’s not easy. People take courses on these programmes. Doing something simple in Photoshop is easy, opening an image, changing the size and the contrast - easy. But, if you want to do something advanced like using layers, masks; people read books, they study.”

With the unique combination of what makes for a powerful image and/or design alongside coding chops (and an equally talented co-founder and now some heavyweight hires), the path from street photographer to builder of a platform that’s aimed at helping data scientists explore ever deeper into data and build predictive models at a fraction of the time and cost of some of today’s de facto methods begins to take shape.

Building upon a somewhat previous iteration of today’s Graphext, known as Contexto, which focuses on delivering data analytics by drawing only for social media data inputs, ups the game by plugging into big pools such as Snowflake, Bigquery, Redshift, and/or Azure, but can also play just as nice with simpler formats such as Excel files, CSVs, Google Sheets, or Notion databases.

“We invested in Graphext due to its potential to transform visual data analytics with its no code approach and ability to process huge amounts of data extremely rapidly,” said Charles Seely, partner, Hoxton Ventures. Graphext is part of a wave of companies that are radically changing business intelligence and data science. Teams have limited time to explore data, they are often struggling with business deadlines, which prevents them from going as deep as they would ideally like to. With Graphext, these teams can break free from these constraints and do more powerful and deep work that will get them to more valuable business insights and outcomes.”