Welcome to OpenOcean’s portfolio and to our series where we shine the spotlight on our awesome companies! At OpenOcean, our mission is to support scaling technical, AI-driven data pioneers from Europe to global category leadership. However, a company is only as good as the people behind it, and this is why we’re excited to share the stories of the teams driving these innovations.
Embeddable is redefining how companies integrate analytics into their products. Founded by Harry Marshall and Tom Gardiner, Embeddable bridges the gap between off-the-shelf business intelligence tools and the costly, resource-heavy process of building analytics features in-house.
Existing solutions often force companies into a trade-off between speed, customisation and usability. Embeddable offers a ‘best of both worlds’ approach, giving product and engineering teams the tools to create fast, native-feeling dashboards with full control over the user experience. By focusing on the specific needs of customer-facing applications, Embeddable helps businesses to quickly deliver seamless analytics experiences that enhance their products and drive growth.
Let’s explore the journey of Embeddable!
What sparked the idea behind Embeddable, and how did it all begin?
We’d been running a successful business intelligence platform since 2016, and like many others in the industry, we kept hearing the same request from our customers: they wanted help with customer-facing analytics.
When we took a closer look at the market, it was clear why this need existed. Most of the available solutions were traditional business intelligence (BI) tools that had been adapted for customer-facing use cases by wrapping dashboards in iframes. This approach comes with a lot of drawbacks, such as limited flexibility and poor end-user experience.
The alternative wasn’t much better. Building everything in-house required significant engineering resources, turning the decision into a ‘build vs. buy’ dilemma with costly trade-offs on both sides.
We realised there was a real opportunity to create a ‘best of both worlds’ solution. One that offered the flexibility of a custom build with the efficiency of an off-the-shelf tool. With our experienced team ready to go, getting started on Embeddable was really a no-brainer.
What sets Embeddable apart from other solutions in the market?
Most embedded analytics tools on the market are designed with internal business intelligence (BI) in mind. They prioritise querying power and standardised UX/UI, often focusing on single-tenant database architectures. While this works well for internal data teams, it doesn’t translate smoothly to customer-facing applications.
In a customer-facing setting, speed and flexibility are everything. Users expect fast loading times and a seamless, on-brand experience. However, when traditional BI tools are squeezed into external applications, often by embedding dashboards in iframes, the result is a clunky, disconnected experience that feels anything but native.
Another challenge is that these tools are built for data teams, not for the product and engineering teams who are responsible for the applications themselves. Essential processes like code versioning, CI/CD and QA are often afterthoughts.
Embeddable solves these issues by focusing on the specific needs of customer-facing applications and the teams that build them. Our approach includes:
- We match the UX/UI flexibility of a custom build by making the code of the charting components completely configurable in code via our SDK.
- We help teams achieve sub-second loading speeds by providing a performant data service with advanced caching and rendering in a secure, performant web component.
- We’re built to handle both single-tenant and multi-tenant database architectures, work with CI/CD processes, provide code versioning, deployment environments, etc.
Everything we build is designed to give product and engineering teams the best possible experience, making it easy to create high-performance, native-feeling dashboards that drive product success.
Looking back, what has been the defining moment in the history of Embeddable?
We’ve had plenty of big moments along the way. Signing our first customers months before Embeddable’s official launch was a huge milestone. Hitting our 100th deal and winning the “Embedded Analytics Solution of the Year” award were also real highlights. Bringing OpenOcean on board as investors felt like another strong validation of our vision.
What truly excites us is the feedback we get from customers who are using Embeddable in real-world scenarios. Hearing how our solution improves their user experiences and supports their business goals is what matters most. At the end of the day, it’s all about delivering real value where it counts.
What’s one piece of feedback from a customer that really stuck with you or shaped how you approach things at Embeddable?
One of the most powerful pieces of advice that helped us as founders was to always apply our own context to advice. It’s easy to read startup stories or hear success tips and think, “That sounds great, let’s apply it to our business”. But what works for one company might not work for another. Every business operates under different circumstances, whether it’s the market, the team or the timing, so it’s important to think critically about any advice you receive. We’ve learned to always ask ourselves whether there’s a solid reason why a particular approach would work for us, rather than just following trends or external examples.
What’s next for Embeddable?
An exciting 2025 and beyond! We ended 2024 on a high, and have already kicked off the new year with new partnerships, new customers, new team members, and a strategy we’re all really aligned on. We’ve got big ambitions for Embeddable and we’re making progress every day.
Thanks Harry and Tom for the interview!
