Feb 11, 2019
At Expa, we talk a lot about our founding principles: design + data. Using data to make better informed product decisions actually led to the creation of one of Expa’s earliest projects; an easy-to-deploy solution that would allow us to easily put key company information in the hands of our teams.
Not having something that met our needs, Expa’s CTO at the time, Sameer Al-Sakran, decided to build a custom solution that we (and our studio companies) could use. Having built several analytics platforms and spent many years working with data, Sameer took years of learnings and frustrations to create what became the first version of Metabase.
Seeing the early success inside Expa, we realized that spinning the product out as a separate company was a good idea — it would allow more teams to benefit from what we believed was a great product. Sameer was the natural leader for Metabase and, while we were sad to lose him as our CTO, we were thrilled to have him lead the company as founder and CEO.
Reception to Metabase has been terrific. They recently closed a Series A financing from NEA and have become one of the top starred projects in GitHub with nearly 14,000 stars. While the team remains small, over 100 external contributors have participated in making the product better. And, many others have helped translate the product, which is now available in 10 different languages. We are all very proud of what Sameer and his team have built, and the impact Metabase has had on the many teams that use it everyday.
Having spent a large chunk of my own career in various analytics roles and working with data of all shapes and sizes, I am very happy to have played small part in the Metabase story and am excited about the future of the company!
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