They grow up so fast

TL;DR: Metabase raised a Series-A and now has an Enterprise Edition

It’s been just over 3 years since we launched in 2015 with another TL;DR of “Open Source Business Intelligence. Installs in 5 minutes, usable by everyone in your company”. Since then, we’ve been starred 14k+ times on GitHub, have had 10M+ Docker Hub pulls (plus another million direct downloads), and have been helped by 140 external contributors. We’ve been translated into 14 languages, and helped users from over 150 countries explore their data.

As we’ve grown, we’ve been committed to maintaining a high bar for our usability and user experience as we’ve shipped a wide variety of new features in 20 major releases. Holding ourselves to the standard of “usable by everyone in your company” has required us to say “no” to a great many feature requests and code submissions. Our users love how simple, elegant and beautiful our interface is for an analytics product, open source or not.

At the same time, the scope of the project has expanded dramatically. We are used in a wide variety of industries and countries to explore data in 13 databases in use cases ranging from company-wide BI to engineers checking in on microservices to powering customer-facing analytics. We currently have close to 2,000 open issues and a core team of only 6 full-time people.

We’ve always dreamed big. Our goal has always been to become the default that anyone in the world reaches for when they want to explore their data or thread data through their company. We want everyone to have the information and context they need in the course of their work days, not just folks with fancy titles and well-trained analysts on hand.

To fully realize this vision and sustain it over the years to come, we needed help and resources. To this end, we’re stoked to announce our Series A. NEA has invested $8M in Metabase and Julia Schottenstein is joining our board of directors. We are excited by NEA’s experience incubating and partnering with Tableau as well their wide experience with Open Source companies like MongoDB, Elastic, Nginx, and Databricks.

With this round, we’ll be able to hire more aggressively and more rapidly improve our product and support our community of users, developers and partners.

Since we have your attention, we are also unveiling our Enterprise edition. This edition has been the second worst-kept secret in the Metabase community. We’ve been quietly developing it over the last year and a number of our users have made the jump. It is tailored to companies running Metabase at scale (100s or 1,000s of accounts) and companies that want to provide self-service reporting to their users. A number of our users have made the jump in helping us get it ready, and if that intrigues you, you can learn more here.

Now you probably have one very big question at this point, between the funding announcement and the enterprise announcement, so here’s hopefully a good answer to it in very big type that will tell you where our head is at around all this.

Building the best open source product we possibly can is always going to be our primary focus

It’s why we started working on this, it’s how we got here, and we won’t ever forget that.

While we take a quick breath and reflect on all that’s happened since launch, one other thing we should say is thank you. Whether you’ve been with us since October 2015, back when things looked very different, or first heard about us a week ago, we wouldn’t be where we are without your bug reports, pull requests, translations, feature requests, issue nudges, thumbs ups, and feedback. Seeing all the ways Metabase is being used, and how much Metabase means to people all around the world gives us constant joy.

And so, from the entire Metabase team - thank you.