We originally started Kyso in 2018 because we were passionate about helping the growing data science community share their insights with the world. Our founding team had experienced first-hand the difficulties one can encounter collaborating on technical results when everyone has their own preferred workflows & tools. This was the foundation on which Kyso was born. Over the next 4 years, we had the honour to collaborate with '000s of users and '00s of organisations, and were supported by a fantastic network of investors, all helping us on this journey.

During this time, the platform went through a number of iterations as we gained a deeper understanding of which needs were most underserved in the space. Our original focus was on Jupyter Notebooks specifically, already fast becoming the new Excel, providing cloud-based compute environments and a simple reporting frontend. We also experimented with building a public Jupyter-based blog, which at one point had over 60k monthly readers! In the meantime, we were speaking with more & more organisations, and a common thread in those conversations began to emerge: the complex tooling ecosystem for data-based workflows, which extends far beyond our previous Jupyter-only focus.

We realised that data science encompasses a wide range of positions within an organisation which today uses code & data to generate results & effect business actions. Now, the problem arises when these technical teams are embedded in a wide variety of tools, even within a single organisation. Because there is no central hub to document & share everything, whatever the source or format, results end up scattered across many different applications. Collaboration happens in smaller, private channels, which impacts wider & long-term discovery.

As companies continue to expand their data science & analytics capabilities, pouring a lot of $$$ into these efforts, they will fail to truly leverage all of the value created by these teamsif knowledge is not documented & searchable. This is the problem the Kyso team consequently set out to solve, a problem so well known that both Stripe and Airbnb built internal solutions. Spotify is working on something similar, and we also know that Netflix is building an in-house aggregator, something most companies don't have the resources to do.

In collaboration with leading Fortune 500s, we built out what is now the current iteration of the product: Kyso is the Sharepoint for modern web formats & technical workflows. A platform where technical teams can publish their work for wider discovery without having to convert to traditional presentation tools when they're ready to share. They can just push their notebooks, html, markdown, & more to Kyso, where they are rendered as readable reports. Kyso's CLI tool makes it easy to integrate into other applications like Git & S3, so published reports are connected to the data source and automatically updated as changes are deployed. As with collaboration on general knowledge management software like Google Docs & Notion, teams can make inline comments and create tasks directly on Kyso reports, shortening the feedback loop between data teams and biz users. In this way, the platform ultimately centralises & streamlines internal research discovery & collaboration.

Our team has worked incredibly hard building Kyso over the last few years. However, the current market environment has made it difficult for us to continue growing the business as we had originally envisioned, and we have decided that the best way forward is to open-source the platform. In this way, organisations can still make use of what we've built, which our team will continue to maintain & develop over time.

Kyso is still alive thanks to the team's ongoing support & commitment to the project. We also want to take this time to extend a massive thank you to our customers, the community and investors who believed in us. We are excited to see how Kyso might evolve in the future.

Please feel free to get in touch with us if you have any questions, would like to contribute or request to expedite feature development for your team's deployment.

Until next time,

The Kyso Team.