Analytics professionals have access to a variety of tools that can help them increase the accuracy of their information and add new details from external sources. But according to Data.world Inc., understanding the big picture requires an entirely different kind of service: a social network.

The startup announced today that it has raised $18.7 million in funding from more than a dozen investors to pursue its vision. Founded in 2015, Data.world operates an online hub where analytics professionals can share the information that they collect as part of their work with peers from around the globe. The platform resembles a cross between Twitter and GitHub.

To sign up for Data.world, a user must create a public profile that follows the same basic design principles as Twitter. There’s a prominent panel on the top right that features a portrait, lists key social statistics right below and provides the ability to show various personal information including a brief biography. At the center of the interface is a real-time feed that shows updates from profiles that an the person follows.

Instead of 140-character messages, however, Data.world displays news about the projects on its site, which is where the similarities with GitHub start to emerge. Each dataset is listed on a dedicated page that contains not only the information itself but also the usage license under which it’s provided and various complementary materials provided by the uploader. The user can include documentation, explanatory graphs and code samples in a project to help the rest of the community make better use of its contents.

Alternatively, submitters who don’t want to handle everything themselves may bring external contributors into the fold using Data.world’s built-in collaboration mechanism. In return for their time and effort, the startup offers members access to a massive collection of information that can provide valuable context for analytics projects. Data.world hosts more than 1,000 public datasets.

Business intelligence workers at a retail chain, for instance, could use the platform to aggregate demographics statistics about different regions and identify the best expansion locations. They might even come across other repositories along the way that can enhance their results. According to Data.world, the fact that all the datasets on its site are in the same format removes the technical barriers to pulling information from multiple sources, which can in turn enable all kinds of new projects. 

The round was led by the family office of billionaire Pat Ryan and included several other notable participants, among them Whole Foods Market Inc. Chief Executive John Mackey and early Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. investor Scott Booth. Data.world has raised a total of $32.7 million to date.

Image courtesy of Data.world