Ducksboard

Ducksboard, founded in Barcelona in 2011 by Aitor Guevara, Diego Mariño, and Jan Urbański, operated as a business intelligence visualization solutions provider. The idea for the company stemmed from Mariño's own experience as an entrepreneur, where he found it challenging to keep up with all the necessary data points to make informed business decisions without waiting for weekly meetings. He identified the need for a single, visually appealing dashboard to consolidate critical metrics. Mariño had previously founded and expanded the cloud infrastructure management company Abiquo. Guevara and Urbański brought technical expertise to the team, with Guevara being a distributed systems engineer and Urbański a database expert.

The company developed a real-time SaaS dashboard designed to track business metrics and web services. Its platform aggregated data from various SaaS applications like Google Analytics, Mailchimp, Twitter, and Zendesk, presenting them in a unified, real-time interface. Clients, primarily small and mid-sized companies, could connect to over 65 different applications and use more than 100 widget options to create custom dashboards for monitoring key performance indicators. The service also allowed users to generate reports in Excel and PDF formats. Ducksboard's business model was based on monthly subscription plans, with pricing starting at $16 per month.

After its founding, Ducksboard secured funding from several Spanish investors, including Kibo Ventures, Danka Capital, and Viriditas Ventures. Despite gaining traction with over 700 business customers, the company faced challenges in achieving its growth targets. Facing potential closure, the founders made a pivotal decision to reach out to New Relic, a software analytics company whose API they already integrated. This led to the acquisition of Ducksboard by New Relic in October 2014, marking New Relic's first-ever company purchase. The acquisition price was reported as $2.3 million in cash plus up to 250,000 shares of New Relic stock. Following the acquisition, the eight-person Ducksboard team remained in Barcelona and joined New Relic's product management and engineering units to integrate the dashboard technology into New Relic's offerings.

Keywords: business intelligence visualization, real-time dashboard, SaaS dashboard, data aggregation, metrics tracking, KPI monitoring, data visualization tool, business metrics, application integration, embedded analytics, New Relic acquisition, Aitor Guevara, Diego Mariño, Jan Urbański, Barcelona startup, data analytics, custom dashboards, web activity tracking, real-time reporting, financial technology analysis