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Courthouse-based data visualization company Lovelytics is on a hiring spree.
The company, founded in 2018, helps clients gather their data in one place and organize, visualize and use the data. Last year, it moved from Rosslyn to Courthouse and doubled in size from 23 to around 50 employees. Founder and CEO Scott Love aims to end 2022 with upward of 100 staff.
“We’re growing quicker than we ever have,” said Love, who’s hired folks in Arlington, across the country and in Canada for Lovelytics’ Toronto outpost, founded in 2019.
In the last two months, a new partnership with data analytics platform Databricks has driven that growth, he says. Lovelytics helps clients who purchase Databricks figure out the best way to use it, which required Love to create and expand his machine learning, artificial intelligence and data engineering departments.
Lovelytics provides a similar service to clients who use the data visualization platform Tableau — and recently won an award for its work helping clients implement the software.
“It’s pretty exciting, since they have tons of partners, around 1,500,” Love said. “For us to win it, especially after only being in business four years at the time, it gives you good publicity, respect from clients you may potentially be working with and credibility.”
That’s not the only accolade the Courthouse startup earned in 2021. The Washington Business Journal recognized it as one of the best places to work in the D.C. area. Love says he tries to keep working for his company fun.
“For me, being a first time entrepreneur, it’s exciting to create a culture,” he said. “It’s been a lot of fun to bring that to life.”
Up until this point, the company has made money without funding rounds, but Love said he’d consider fundraising if he wants to scale up the company faster than it’s growing today, or launch new products.
While Lovelytics is mostly a service-oriented company, last year, it launched its first product called InstantAnalytics, which helps companies centralize and organize the data that multiple sources are collecting.
“That’s really what our job is: being able to translate business problems into technical solutions,” he said.
But many of the companies that needed organizational help with their data when Lovelytics was founded are more mature now, Love says. He’s focused on hiring employees to help those clients obtain insights using their data to solve complex problems through machine learning, artificial intelligence and predictive models.
“When you start to gather that much information, you’re able to get these crazy predictive insights because you know what 10 million customer transactions have done,” he said.
The Courthouse startup has also taken on special projects, building an interactive map of California wildfires for Pacific Gas and Electric’s website and visualizing dense reports by the international non-governmental organization World Economic Forum.
“We can create these concise, consolidated visuals that look good… and you grab that attention of a casual person who may or may not be interested in the topic,” he said.
Ultimately, though, Love aims to give companies the tools their employees need to do their own deep-dives.
“The big thing is self-sufficiency. You have to be able to enable people to do their own analysis,” he said. “Those employees are able to do much better work if they’re not having to wait on the IT department because they’ve been enabled to build their own reports and do their own deep-dive insights.”