FusionCharts Journey from Spreadsheets to Great Charts

It all began in 2002 when our CEO, all of 17-years then, was fed up of *boring* charts in Excel. This, alongside an opportunity to tap into the lack of interactive charting solutions on the web and rake in decent pocket money set the ball in motion. He figured out an innovative way using Macromedia Flash (back then) to make charts interactive and fun, published that as an article and the rest as they say is “HISTORY”.

Our evolution has been exciting all along. Starting without any external funding (in fact none till date) and all of six chart types (since that’s all of what we knew back then), the first version of FusionCharts was launched. It steadily picked up steam and today we boast of 90 chart types and 550 maps. More importantly, FusionCharts today powers over a *billion* charts a month in some of the most popular web destinations like LinkedIn, Weather.com, Google Docs etc. We also have a picture of President Obama using FusionCharts products….and no it is NOT Photoshopped!!!!!!

For the first three years of our existence, a desk and a chair were all we had. No “official” office, no employees, not even an office number to call up on. In fact, the founder’s home number doubled up as the office number and he changed accents when you thought the call had been transferred from the support to the sales team. We didn’t even have a single dedicated sales person till we got to 10,000 customers, forget a sales team. In fact, we hadn’t even stepped out on foreign soil for as much as an expo till a year back. Guess we can safely say that hard work and persistence does pay off.

As we moved up the value-chain, so did our learnings and offerings. From our first ever tag line “The extensive real-time animated graphing solution” to the current “Data to delight… in minutes,” we have come a long way. We learnt a lot about technology, markets, dynamics and even marketing. We have our own mascot too, the FusionCharts Dude. We introduced products for Microsoft SharePoint, PowerPoint, VB6, Adobe Flex and Joomla. We even gave back to the community a free version of our core product. Success breeds more success and we gained tremendous coverage in leading publications like Forbes, Entrepreneur, Mixergy, Penn-Olson and far too many magazines, all of these without spending a single dime on PR. We have also been acknowledged as one of the 50 fastest growing tech firms in India and one of the top 500 firms in Asia-Pacific.

This is just the beginning and we are working hard to constantly push the boundaries of data visualization. We thank you for being with us along this exciting journey, for the brickbats and the bouquets alike. It matters a lot to us.