Launching xcharta’s plot digitization product

We want to talk about why we built xcharta and why we're so excited to have launched.

Picture the scene: It's 9PM the night before a major client update. A cooling takeaway and a couple of half-drunk coffees surround three screens and a laptop, casting their glow onto a fairly anxious junior consultant. As part of a due diligence, she's building a complex market model to forecast global demand for radiator & boiler production. She's been waiting nervously for critical market reports from a research firm, eagerly refreshing her mailbox every ten minutes.

Finally, it shows up: 150 PDFs in total containing 10 years of historic data, all in bar chart form, with no excel source numbers. Sighing resignedly, she gets out her trusty ruler out from her desk draw and starts measuring the bar charts on her screen, bar by bar to gauge the values, and begins diligently typing the numbers into excel. The pixels on screen start blurring into one another. A sleepless night of data crunching ensues.

As two former consultants, we've been there ourselves. It still amazes us that there isn't an effective technical solution that exists for this problem. xcharta is our solution for sleepless junior consultants but also for anyone who's been frustrated by the inaccessibility of data.

So what does xcharta do? We use AI and computer vision technology to extract and interpret visual data from charts – turning pictures into numbers. Our technology analyses visual data like the human eye would, scanning a full pdf document in one go and extracting the data into excel. This is a first of its kind solution, and we hope it's going to revolutionise the way we do research.

We know we would have loved this tool when we worked in consulting, and are really excited about the applications in other industries (life sciences, finance, market research, academia, to name a few). Our starting point is a SaaS product accessible through a web interface - just the beginning on a jam-packed roadmap looking to address the numerous user problems in this space.

So thank you for showing an interest in our product. We're extremely excited to have launched, and to have you on the journey with us!

Venetia & Louis