Milwaukee-based BrightStar Wisconsin Foundation is among several investors who have helped reporting and analytics startup Beekeeper Data complete a $550,000 seed round.
The other investors included Madison-based Wisconsin Investment Partners and Illinois fund Sierra Ventures, as well as other Midwestern investors.
Beekeeper graduated from Milwaukee’s gener8tor business accelerator program in October 2014 and started a private beta rollout. Founded in 2013 by software engineer Matthew Rathbone, who lists Drop.io, Shoutlet and Foursquare on his resume, Beekeeper is based in Madison.
The company developed a reporting platform that allows businesses to create attractive visual data reports that are sent by email. With the seed funding, it has launched its flagship product, which it calls the “MailChimp for data.”
“After manually building a spreadsheet report for the hundredth time, I figured there must be a better way to share data, so I set out to build something new,” Rathbone said. “We’ve worked hard to make reporting as easy as sending an email newsletter, and the reception to this approach from our customers has been fantastic.”
