Linktree, Culture Amp and Up founders back ‘Canva for data’ startup WhyHive in $600,000 pre-Seed

Data analysis startup WhyHive has raised $600,000 in a pre-Seed round.

The company’s first raise comes after six years of bootstrapping and was led by Skalata Ventures, with support from Culture Amp’s Jon Williams, Linktree’s Alex Zaccaria and Up Bank’s Dom Pym.

The Melbourne startup describes itself as “like Canva, but for data: easy to use and accessible”. Users can upload data like surveys, sales data, product reviews or spreadsheets to the WhyHive app and create a quick and easy analysis with just a few clicks.

Cofounders T Guthrie and Matt Cohen came up with the idea while running a social enterprise data consultancy together. The duo took their inspiration from how Canva made design more accessible for everyday users, believing they could apply it to data analysis.

That generous spirit continues with a rather unique production demonstration for other startup founders: Guthrie and Cohen are also sharing the data from their raise as a sample dataset in the WhyHive app, hoping it can help other first-time founders to raise capital.

“We had no idea what a successful fundraise looked like when we started, so we want to open-source our experience for other founders,” Cohen said.

The raise took six months and involved 119 meetings in total. They met 81% of their investors via warm intros and 56% within a month of the round closing. The top reasons for investing were backing as founders (88%), followed by the market opportunity (81%).

The user interface draws inspiration from Canva, Miro and Google Sheets, and 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,” he said.

“Businesses are drowning in data but very few have a way to analyse it. It’s too hard, too time-consuming, or too expensive. What if we built a tool that could do the most common analysis tasks and make them dead easy?”

Cohen said they’re often asked 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,” he said.

“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”.

They’ve also opened up WhyHive for free access.

Dom Pym from Euphemia said: “ We invested in WhyHive early days because we believe in their mission. We love that they want to democratise data exploration for everyone, helping elevate the entire ecosystem.”