Why we built Kimo (and why it has a mascot)

Before Kimo, Théo and I spent a combined fifteen years building data platforms at companies of every size. The pattern was always the same. A small, brilliant data team would build a beautiful warehouse. Then they would spend the next three years answering the same questions in Slack, because the people who needed the numbers could not get them on their own.

The marketing lead wanted to know which campaigns brought customers. The CFO wanted MRR that matched the books. The ops team wanted to know when something broke. None of them wanted to learn SQL, and none of them should have had to.

A data officer, not a data tool

We kept describing what we wanted as a person: someone who knows where all the data lives, keeps the definitions straight, answers questions quickly, and says “I am not sure” when they are not sure. A data officer. So we built software that behaves like one.

1. 1Connect — it goes and gets the data, wherever it lives, and keeps it fresh.
2. 2Model — it agrees with you on what words mean, writes it down, and sticks to it.
3. 3Answer — in charts, dashboards, alerts, or plain English, with the working shown.

So, the mascot

People ask about Kimo — the character — more than any feature. The honest answer is that it started as a placeholder in a Figma file and survived every attempt to remove it, because user testing kept telling us the same thing: people were more willing to ask a “dumb” question to a friendly character than to an empty text box.

So Kimo stayed, and grew a wardrobe. The light-blue Kimo is upbeat and a bit chaotic, like a good growth marketer. The deep-blue Kimo wears the metaphorical suit for finance. The gunmetal Kimo is quiet and serious, because people working on sovereignty and defence have no patience for cute. Same character, three personalities — the same way the product is one engine with three front doors.

What we will not compromise on

• Never make up a number. If Kimo is not sure, it says so and asks.
• Your data stays yours. Region pinning in the cloud, full on-prem when you need it, no training on customer data.
• Explain, do not just display. Every chart knows where its numbers came from.
• Fast beats clever. If a task takes more than a few minutes, that is our bug, not yours.

Where we go from here

We are a small team with a big list. If you want to see what we have built so far, the live demo runs on simulated data and you cannot break anything. If you want to help build what comes next, we are hiring. And if you just want to say hello, the contact page goes straight to a human.