Visual.ly raises $2 Million to make Data look Interesting and Nice

Visual.ly, the infographics start-up, has recently announced the end of a new round of funding which has brought the company the amount of $2 million. This funding round has been led by Crosslink Capital, SoftTech and 500 Startups, with the participation of Kapor Capital, Giza Ventures, Naval Ravikant, Mark Goines, Josh James and others. The company intends to use the money raised in this new round of funding in order to increase its development team and to hire some more data visualization specialists.

Visual.ly is now designing a service which is going to allow customers to create interesting and beautiful, custom infographics by using the information which is to be found on various databases and APIs. They intend to create a service which is going to be automated, meaning that all users have to do is to type in the description of the type of information they would like to visually display and that will automatically generate an infographic. It has been in July that the company first produced an example of what the service can do. This has been released by the means of its Twitter Visualization Project.

As a matter of fact, the services put at our disposal by Visual.ly come as a true necessity of the market, as there is a continuously growing demand for timely, relevant infographics among news publications and communication organizations. At the moment, the companies which need to generate infographics constantly have to hire a designer and to dedicate resources to the gathering of information, which are two processes which are both timely and costly.

Stew Langille, the CEO of Visual.ly, stated the following: “There are no tools for this type of thing. People are either creating really bad-looking visuals using Microsoft Applications [such as the native Windows app MS Paint] or they’re hiring a graphic designer, which takes time and money — it’s a hassle. So, we’re trying to create a tool that we can license out to the industry.”

Langille has previously worked for Mint.com, the money blog. He has stated that the company is trying to help digital news media outlets evolve in the same manner in which the Gannett-owned USA Today’s visually stimulating weather infographics did back in the early ‘90s and in the way in which Wired’s innovative graphic design did in the previous decade.

At the moment, the company already has several partnerships for the Alpha release of this project. The company has already produced infographics foe a number of media company partners such as The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, AskMen, CNNMoney, The Economist, NASDAQ, National Geographic and the Wall Street Journal.

By now, there are already more than 26.000 companies which have signed up for the Visual.ly’s beta testing, which is scheduled to go public at the end of December. As that may not be enough in order to stimulate the interest of customers, the company also announced that it has created over 30.000 infographics, that it has doubled the index of infographics hosted on its website and that it already has more than a million monthly page views.