Embedded data analytics startup Embeddable is still handpicking its customers despite strong demand

Tom Gardiner and Harry Marshall founded Trevor.io in 2016 as a no-code business intelligence platform to help non-data people run analysis on their internal data. That business was solid, but customers increasingly started asking the company for access to the same tools for their customer-facing data.

Gardiner told TechCrunch that the company initially resisted the calls to build a new product and stayed heads down and focused on their internal data tool. But soon the demand became too much to ignore, Gardiner said.

Gardiner, Embeddable co-founder and CEO, said that his company isn’t looking to help companies go from zero to one with their data analytics but rather help customers with existing analytics find scale. Embeddable wants to help these companies build these analytic dashboards faster but leave the presentation and design up to them, similar to gaming software tools like Unity and Unreal Engine, he said.

“It doesn’t take away the creativity, it just gives them the power to build it the way they want, and gives them all that kind of tooling, and so that’s what we’ve done with Embeddable,” Gardiner said.

The company is still building out the tech; Embeddable Developer is currently in private beta and handpicking each and every customer that it works with. More than 800 companies have applied to work with Embeddable since it opened this beta in December 2023, and the startup has accepted fewer than 100, Marshall, co-founder and COO, said.

“Every company that we work with, we’ve made them go through this application and then jumped on a call with them to talk about what their requirements are,” Marshall told TechCrunch. “The vast majority of companies, we turn them away. We’re focused on this core developer experience. We’re really optimizing for companies whose requirements match what we do.”

This strategy has worked thus far, and Embeddable is signing more than $100,000 in new revenue each month and is getting ready to scale.

The London-based company just raised a €6 million ($6.29 million) seed round led by OpenOcean with participation from Four Rivers and Techstars, among others. The fresh funds will be used to build up the company’s team and put resources into building out more templates for companies and new growth strategies.

So far, the majority of the company’s growth has been through SEO and search engines as people search for alternatives to replace the industry’s legacy players like Tableau and Microsoft’s Power BI, Gardiner said. And while they’ve enjoyed keeping a tight grip on who has access to the product, they know that this model limits Embeddable’s growth.

“We kind of handhold you in the sense that if you want to connect your database, we kind of have to help you with that, or if you want to invite a user, we have to help you with that, because in the end, we haven’t prioritized those things, because we’ve been prioritizing the things that really add value,” Gardiner said. “But obviously, for a self-serve motion, you need to be able to sign yourself up.”

The company hopes to be able to open a general sign up system for its tech by the end of next year. Embeddable is also working on giving the end customer more ability to self-serve and customize their own experience, which they hope to roll out in Q1.

“We literally have people moving from Looker, to us, from Tableau, from GoodData, like, these kind of big names,” Gardiner said. “People are moving over to us on a weekly basis, which is really, really interesting, and we never would have thought we would be winning customers from these big guys already.”