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Visual.ly

Visual.ly, an online data visualization and infographics resource, has raised $2 million in seed funding. The funding was led by Crosslink Capital, SoftTech and 500 Startups. Angels investors namely Giza Ventures, Kapor Capital, Mark Goines, Naval Ravikant, Josh James and others also invested in the company.

Even in its beta, Visual.ly attracted much attention. It had 26,000 signed up users, according to the company, and over 300,000 of infographics created. Its monthly page views were over one million.

Visual.ly had roped into partnership companies like The Economist, CNN Money, AskMen, Skype, National Geographic, Wall Street Journal, BuzzFeed, NASDAQ, GOOD and Altlantic in its pre-beta launch. Visual.ly provided these companies with infographics and data visualization.

The company is building a service that allows users to create customized infographics using information from various database and APIs. Visual.ly came up with a prototype of the solution with Twitter Visualization Project in July 2011.

More and more companies are in need of simple and effective infographics and data visualization, but the cost of infographics is too high and the quality low. Most organizations have to hire a designer and get a few more employees to gather information. Therefore, Visual.ly is creating a tool that they can license to the industry.

According to the company, infographics and data visualization helps people find and experience stories, communicate complex ideas simply and seeing the world of data in a new way.

Visual.ly wants to use the funding money to build their development team and bring in data visualization experts. It plans to launch its beta within this year and make it public soon after.