Humaans & Lightdash: An Exciting Double Scoop

Our philosophy here at Moonfire has always been to identify key sources of disruption, find where they cross with the sectors driving innovation, and then back the breakthrough business at the intersection. So we’re excited to announce that two of portfolio companies, Humaans and Lightdash – both testament to this approach – have just raised new rounds.

Humaans

Humaans is reimagining the HR tech stack, bringing best-in-class HR stack solutions together and automating people ops, through which they wish to simplify tasks at the convergence of finance, IT and HR.

In short: It’s HR for the 21st century.

Founders Giovanni Luperti and Karolis Narkevicius were in growth mode from day one of starting the company back in April 2020, and they haven’t let up the pace since then.

Nor has the world let them. The pandemic forced HR teams around the globe to navigate major, lasting shifts in working practice. So in a department that was already under-resourced and lacking effective tools, Humaans was a godsend.

At heart, Humaans is a central hub and single source of truth for employee management, handling everything from onboarding to payroll to process automation. And by connecting up the data, it allows people teams to shape their HR tech stack in the way that works for them, creating a custom platform that can flex and evolve with the business and its people.

We’re delighted to see them complete their $15m Series A round, led by Stripe alum Lachy Groom, with participation from the likes of Exor, Exponent Founders Capital, Shopify founder Tobias Lütke, Slack founder Stewart Butterfield and Niantic COO Megan Quinn – adding to their already amazing roster of angels, including former LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, Des Traynor from Intercom and Dylan Field from Figma.

As well as continuing to invest in product development and hiring, they now plan to double down on their UK presence and expansion into the broader European market. They’re also focussing on faster data access at scale to better automate the flow of employee data across the tech stack and further supercharge people teams.

Lightdash

Lightdash is building the open-source business intelligence (BI) platform for modern data teams.

As the data stack evolves, and data analysts operate more and more like software developers, existing BI tools are increasingly unfit for purpose, failing to meet the needs of both data analysts and data consumers.

Lightdash turns dbt – a data transformation tool that allows analysts to transform raw data in their warehouse using SQL – projects into a full-stack BI platform.

This means analysts can manage everything as code, defining business logic for metrics and KPIs using developer workflows, while a visual layer allows non-technical users (in the marketing and finance teams, for example) to quickly create their own charts and dashboards. SQL for the experts and an intuitive UI for the rest.

It’s a step-change in the way data teams work: a better way to both build BI and share it with the rest of the business.

And they’ve developed quite the following. Over the last year and a half, the team has built an active community around the free, self-hosted version of its product and a private beta of its fully managed Lightdash Cloud service, counting Accenture, Beauty Pie and Warner Media among its customers.

Now, having closed its $8.4m seed round, Lightdash has just launched the public beta of its core cloud product, with a waitlist of more than 600 companies.

The round was made up of a previously unannounced $2.4m round led by us, with participation from Y Combinator, dbt Labs founder Tristan Handy, Supercell founder Ilkka Paananen and Google’s Bradley Horowitz, and a recent $6m raise in which we welcomed Accel and an all-star group of angels, including Snyk founder Guy Podjarny and Gitlab CMO Ashley Kramer.

Lightdash is also adding new faces to the crew and expanding Lightdash University, an educational programme to help BI teams improve their craft – and a chance for the team to geek out about hard data problems with their community!

Congratulations to both Humaans and Lightdash. We can’t wait to see, and be part of, what’s next.

Mattias & the Moonfire Team
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