Investing in new data visualization capabilities with Bayes

Every day, people use Airtable to manage their most critical work—from producing major motion pictures, to launching new global retail products, and beyond. Each of those workflows requires important, often complex sets of data—like schedules, inventory lists, and performance metrics. It’s why we’re constantly investing in ways for people to visualize this data with new views like Gantt as well as our Chart and Summary apps.

Today, we’re announcing that Airtable has acquired the team and assets from Bayes, a no-code data visualization tool that shares our vision of making highly technical concepts more intuitive for non-developers. Data visualization tools are powerful, with countless ways to depict information in charts, graphs, tables, and more—but they’re typically only accessible to data scientists and others with specialized programming skills. Bayes enables anyone to upload data, get recommendations on the best way to visualize it, and more quickly identify the insights they need. The team helped people transform data into evidence, allowing them to make clearer arguments, and improve their businesses.

This is Airtable’s first acquisition, and the Bayes team will now focus on strengthening Airtable’s data visualization and reporting capabilities, including better insights for people who manage bases and new ways to depict complex workflows. Bayes will be winding down its operations over the coming weeks, and its vision of helping people make better, more data-driven decisions will live on through the team’s work at Airtable.

As contributors to the open-source data visualization library Vega-Lite (available as an app in Airtable Marketplace), the Bayes team helped empower people around the world to identify and act on insights from abstract data sets, increasing the value they get from their data. Co-founders Will Strimling and Justin Woodbridge first met at a research lab and started thinking about data visualization solutions both on and off the clock. Along with the other members of the team, Kelvin Li and Isaac Parker, they bring a wealth of valuable experience from time spent in data visualization research labs at the University of Washington and UC Davis as well as at companies like FiveThirtyEight, Microsoft, and Twitter.

They considered Airtable as a bit of a spiritual guide in the no-code landscape and wanted to democratize data visualization tools in a similar way. At Airtable they’ll continue that work, in a new home with a shared mission.