Metalayer to offer drag and drop data science: in first funding round, seeking Philly investors ‘that get us’

Take esoteric, complex data analysis traditionally performed by wonky data scientists and reduce it to a couple of drag and drop mouse clicks, simple enough for anyone who knows the difference between a pie chart and bar graph to perform.

In a world increasingly reliant on data analytics, it’s actually a somewhat democratic approach to data science. But Metalayer cofounder Jon Gosier, 31, says he and cofounder Matthew Griffiths, 32, just found it to be a practical direction to reorient their startup.

“Basically what we’re doing is we’re solving a problem that many growing organizations face. With all the growing troves of data one of the biggest constraints companies face is they don’t have enough data scientists,” said Gosier, who met Griffiths in Uganda while doing work with Ushahidi. “Instead of having to reply upon your CTO or research analysts, now anyone in your company can do what was previously in the domain of experts.”

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The DreamIt grads, who now work out of Callowhill-incubator Venturef0rth, originally started out trying to make it easy to visualize data, but Gosier says their customers kept asking for more. They quickly realized there was a bigger data opportunity to grab.

“They were like, ‘Oh, this is cool, but can we work with Hadoop or can the rest of my staff use this?'” Gosier said. “After we started talking to enough customers telling us the same thing, we thought maybe we could make a bigger play here by offering drag and drop data science so that became our strategy. ”

Metalayer now offers three products: their APIs, the drag and drop dashboard for enterprise customers and DeLv, a community dashboard which is still in private beta. DeLv will eventually be available for anyone to sign up for, use and share with the community, Gosier told Technically Philly.

So far, the new strategy seems to be working for the now three-man crew. Metalayer added director of business development and sales Chris Burrage, 26, to the team after graduating from DreamIt in fall 2011.

Over the last few months, Gosier says Metalayer has been profitable with no external capital, but is about to close a round of funding. Metalayer’s plans for Delv played an influential role in the decision to raise money, Gosier told Technically Philly.

“We want to stay pretty lean. We don’t want to be one of those startups that assumes that you’re not going to have rainy days,” Gosier said. “We just want to be conservative with how we grow.”

If they close the round, the money will be used to hire a backend data science engineer and a front-end UI engineer, Gosier says.

Metalayer has also been getting some national recognition. In March, Gosier was asked to keynote the O’Reilly Strata Conference  in San Jose, an opportunity that led to a spot in the Strata Startup Showcase. Metalayer won the event after being screened by a panel of venture capitalists and selected by the audience.

You can see video of Burrage explaining Metalayer at the Strata Startup Showcase below [discussion of Metalayer begins at 2:43].

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgwGK14l-NI?rel=0]

TechCrunch also recently invited Metalayer to host an API hackathon at TechCrunch Disrupt, allowing developers to build applications of the Metalayer API.

“We aren’t the size of company that typically sponsors such events because it’s usually funding companies or companies that are big and have tons of staff,” Gosier said. “For us it was a great opportunity to showcase one of our products, which [are] our APIs and what they can do and also have some cool things built on top of it.”

Gosier says he took advantage of the moment to announce Metalayer’s integration with the InfoChimps platform and Hadoop which adds more analytic power to the its dashboard.

Their time on the West Coast has netted them plenty of interest from investors there, and Gosier says many of them would like to see Metalayer make the cross country move.

“Unfortunately we haven’t had much in terms of Philly VCs. Out there, they seem to get us more,” Gosier said. “It’s one of the unfortunate things that happens with the Philly scene is there are a lot of great startups here doing things people here don’t get.”

Gosier says he hopes they don’t have to do that and are “trying to find someone who appreciates Philly.”