Alteryx bet that the person who needs the answer should be able to get it without waiting on a programmer. Its software turned data work into a canvas of boxes and arrows. An analyst could pull in spreadsheets and databases, join them, clean them and run a forecast in an afternoon. When it went public in March 2017, companies were drowning in data and short of people who could code.

Twenty Years in Irvine

Dean Stoecker, Libby Duane Adams and Ned Harding started the company in 1997 in Southern California, first selling maps and census data for marketing. The work showed them how much time analysts spent preparing data before they could study it. They rebuilt the product around that problem and renamed the company Alteryx. Customers paid a yearly subscription for each analyst. The bet was that millions of spreadsheet users wanted more power without learning to program.

Analysts Go Private

Alteryx priced at $14 a share in March 2017 and listed on the New York Stock Exchange as AYX. Growth was strong for several years as more companies bought licenses for their analysts. As software moved to the cloud, the desktop product slowed. In December 2023 Clearlake Capital and Insight Partners agreed to buy Alteryx for about $4.4 billion, including debt, at $48.25 a share. The deal closed in March 2024.

Cover: The Astrolabe - Amerigo Vespucci, from Nova Reperta, Jan van der Straet. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for an astrolabe (instruments that read the world).