We've watched every major BI acquisition since 1999.
We built the alternative.
Crystal Reports. Qlik. Tableau. Looker. Izenda. Logi. Dundas. Exago. Every time: the press release says nothing will change. Every time: the roadmap stalls, support thins, and pricing shifts. We've been watching this pattern since before most BI companies existed — and building for the customers it leaves behind.
25+ years of building the same thing — better
The product changed. The platform changed. The name changed. The mission didn't: give the people who build software a reporting layer they don't have to build themselves.
OakTree Enterprise Solutions — the first semantic layer
We started as a Computer Associates consulting firm. Every CA customer was asking for the same thing: custom reports from their enterprise tools — Asset Management, Service Desk, Network Management. We stopped building one-offs and built a product: OakTree Navigator, a semantic layer on top of CA's database. We paid for a booth at CA World and announced it. The room was full. About 20 customers from the US Army alone came aboard.
Beyond CA — the AnyDB realization
We expanded to HP, BMC, NetIQ, and others. But every customer conversation kept circling back to the same question: "Can you do this against our database?" Not a vendor's product — their own application data. That was the insight. We didn't build for a specific vendor's schema. We built Yurbi for AnyDB — a semantic layer builder that could sit on top of any relational database. The product you're looking at today started there.
Business Objects buys Crystal Reports — we watch it happen the first time
Business Objects acquired Crystal Reports and we had a front-row seat to what that meant for customers: roadmap uncertainty, shifting support models, pricing pressure. Customers who had built workflows on Crystal started looking for exits. We took notes. It wouldn't be the last time we'd see this play out — but it was the first time we understood what it meant to embed your business in a vendor that someone else could acquire.
Web, 5000fish, and Yurbi v9
We moved OakTree Navigator from desktop to the web — first in Microsoft Silverlight, then rebuilt on pure JS/HTML. We split into a sister company, named it 5000fish, and rebranded the product as Yurbi. That was v9. The version you can download today is v12. The codebase has been continuously refined — never rewritten, never replaced, never acquired. Major UX and platform generations every three to four years, weekly builds in between.
The acquisition wave accelerates
Thoma Bravo took Qlik private in a $3B deal. Salesforce acquired Tableau for $15.7B. Google acquired Looker for $2.6B. In each case the pattern held: product absorbed into a larger org, roadmap subordinated to the acquirer's priorities, pricing reset to match enterprise expectations. Customers with embedded dependencies — ISVs who had built Tableau or Qlik into their own products — found themselves renegotiating from a position of zero leverage.
The embedded analytics rollup — Insightsoftware acquires four products in 16 months
Insightsoftware acquired Logi Analytics. Eight days later, they acquired Izenda. Then Exago. Then Dundas. Four embedded analytics products — each with their own codebase, their own customers, their own roadmap — merged into what is now Logi Symphony. The ISVs who had built their products on Izenda or Exago found themselves migrating to a platform they didn't choose, on a timeline they didn't set. Our phones got busier.
v12. .NET9. Docker, Linux, Windows. Still independent.
We ship weekly. We support Docker, Linux, and Windows. We migrated to .NET9. We've done major UX generations while keeping every customer's data, configuration, and reports intact across versions. We're bootstrapped — no private equity, no strategic acquirer waiting in the wings. The engineers who built Yurbi answer your support tickets. That's not a marketing line. It's how we've operated since 1999.
Every press release says nothing will change
We've watched this happen enough times to recognize the cycle. The sequence is almost always the same — and for ISVs who have embedded their product on top of one of these platforms, the consequences are real.
Acquisition announced
"We're excited to join [acquiring company]. Nothing will change for customers."
Roadmap subordinated
The acquirer's priorities take over. Features the embedded customer base needed stall or disappear.
Support degrades
The engineers who knew the product move on. Tickets go to a tier-1 queue that can't answer ISV-specific questions.
Pricing resets
At renewal, the acquirer prices to the customer's switching cost — not the product's value. You're locked in, they know it.
Acquisitions we've watched since 1999
Yurbi has never been acquired. 5000fish has never taken outside investment. There is no acquirer waiting.
Built conversation by conversation. Build by build.
This isn't a marketing line. Every feature in Yurbi traces back to a real ISV telling us exactly what they needed — or a prospect who walked because we didn't have it yet.
Every demo teaches us something
Most demos don't convert. That's fine. We listen harder in the ones that don't — because the friction that stops someone from buying is exactly what we need to fix next. Dynamic data source routing got on the roadmap because three ISVs in the same month needed it and walked when we didn't have it.
Every trial reveals gaps
Trial users hit things paying customers have learned to work around. A trial that churns after three days is one of the most valuable data points we have. We read every exit. FastCache exists partly because trial users reported that dashboard load times were too slow under multi-tenant load.
Every customer shapes the next version
We started with US Army CA customers who needed specific output formats for procurement workflows. Those requirements made Yurbi better at scheduled export and PDF delivery than products built in controlled demo environments. Real customers doing real things with real constraints make better software than any roadmap committee.
Weekly builds, not annual roadmaps
When you need a fix or a new visualization type, it ships on the next build — not the next annual release cycle. We've maintained weekly releases for years. The changelog isn't a marketing document. It's the real record of what customers asked for and what we shipped.
5000fish — the company behind Yurbi
The name comes from the Biblical feeding of the 5000 — the idea of leveraging limited resources to serve the needs of many. That's been our operating philosophy since 1999: small team, focused product, outsized impact for the ISVs who build on it.
Make things easier, not harder
Our north star in everything
Every pricing decision, every interface choice, every support interaction runs through this filter. Flat-tier pricing exists because per-user math is too complicated when you're building a multi-tenant product. Full features in every plan exist because choosing a tier to unlock a basic security feature is friction we refuse to create.
We tell you when we're not the right fit
Honesty over conversion
We'd rather you find the right tool than start a trial on false premises. If you need a full SDK instead of iframe embedding, we'll say so. If your architecture genuinely doesn't fit the Yurbi model, we'll tell you before you spend three weeks on a trial. An honest "not yet" is better than a bad customer relationship.
Your best interest is our best interest
25+ years with no bait-and-switch
We're a services company at heart who happens to make software. When you have a problem, you reach the people who built the product — not a tiered support queue. We take feedback seriously because it's the actual mechanism by which the product improves. What you see on the pricing page is what you pay.
Lost deals ship features
Most of our roadmap started as a "no"
When a trial doesn't convert, we ask why. When a demo stalls on one capability, we write it down. The multi-tenant security architecture, dynamic data source routing, the per-tenant branding system — all of these trace back to ISVs who told us exactly what they needed and either waited for us to ship it or found something else in the meantime.
We didn't chase the AI wave. We watched it first.
Every embedded BI vendor added "AI-powered" to their homepage in 2023. We didn't. Here's why — and what's actually coming.
Getting the foundation right first
AI is only as useful as the layer it sits on top of. Our semantic layer — the way we model your data, build queries, and enforce tenant security — is that layer. We've been refining it for 25 years. AI that connects to a shaky foundation produces shaky results. In a multi-tenant ISV context, a hallucinating query engine isn't just a bad user experience — it's a data isolation risk for your customers. We're not going to ship that.
We watched what happened to the first wave of "AI BI" features: query suggestions that hallucinated column names, natural language interfaces that couldn't handle real data complexity. We watched the market learn. Now we're building deliberately.
AI where it actually helps
Our architecture is well-suited for AI integration. The semantic layer means AI can build queries accurately because it understands the data model — not just raw column names. Security policies are enforced at the platform layer, not the prompt layer.
- Plain language queries — describe what you want to see, get a working report
- Visualization suggestions — right chart for the right data, automatically
- Analysis on your outputs — trend detection and anomaly flagging against your data
- Model-agnostic — not locked to one provider; right model for the right task
If AI is a hard requirement today, we're not the right fit right now. We'll get there — and when we do, it'll be integrated into a foundation that actually enforces your tenant security model.
Need BI for your own internal team or clients — not embedded in a product you sell?
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