Preset

Preset is a business intelligence and data visualization company that commercializes Apache Superset, the open-source analytics platform originally created by its founder, Maxime Beauchemin. The core product, Preset Cloud, is a hosted and managed Superset service, offered alongside managed-cloud, on-premises, and embedded analytics deployment options. Functionality described by the company includes a drag-and-drop dashboard builder, interactive dashboards, a SQL IDE (SQL Lab) for ad-hoc querying and preparing data, a semantic layer for publishing metrics, columns, and virtual datasets, a caching layer, and a dataset-centric modeling approach intended to limit datasets to relevant columns for faster queries.

The platform positions itself as a visualization layer on top of a customer's existing data infrastructure, is described as agnostic to the underlying data architecture, and does not require a separate ingestion layer. At general availability in 2021, Preset Cloud advertised more than 40 out-of-the-box visualization types and integrations with SQL-speaking data sources such as Snowflake, BigQuery, Druid, Presto and Dremio, plus single sign-on, role-based access control and SOC2 compliance. More recently the company has added AI-oriented capabilities, including a Preset Chatbot and a Preset MCP interface that lets customers connect their own agents to build charts and dashboards, as well as scheduled reports that deliver filtered, tabbed dashboards.

Preset also maintains a public engineering presence through its preset-io GitHub organization, which hosts a fork of Apache Superset and tools such as a backend SDK, a Superset/Preset CLI, an Elasticsearch DBAPI and SQLAlchemy dialect, an embedded-example Flask app, agent skills for Superset and Preset MCP, and Agor, described as a team command center for agentic work.

Founding story

Apache Superset, the project underpinning Preset, began as a hackathon project at Airbnb in the summer of 2015, built to slice, dice and visualize data from Apache Druid. It grew to surpass Tableau as Airbnb's main data visualization solution and entered incubation with the Apache Software Foundation in 2016. Maxime Beauchemin, who created Superset at Airbnb and also created Apache Airflow, and who held data roles at Yahoo!, Facebook, Airbnb and Lyft, founded Preset on the premise that open-source projects eventually need commercial backing and funding to reach their potential.

Business model

Preset offers enterprise SaaS built on Apache Superset, distributed as cloud-hosted, managed cloud, on-premises, and embedded deployments, with a self-service free tier and paid plans; the company emphasizes freemium, self-service pricing and portability of charts and dashboards back to open-source Superset as an anti-lock-in argument.

Subscription software revenue from its Superset-based platform, with a free tier and self-service sign-up alongside enterprise and custom deployments sold via sales consultation.

Traction

After six months in private beta, Preset made Preset Cloud generally available in August 2021 and cited strong demand and early adopters including Funimation Global Group. The company reports its team contributes more than 75% of commits to Apache Superset, and Superset is described as having enterprise users at companies such as Airbnb, Lyft and Twitter. Its GitHub organization lists 72 repositories, with the Agor project at roughly 1,371 stars.

Latest developments

Preset now markets itself as AI-native BI, promoting a Preset Chatbot and a Preset MCP endpoint that lets customers connect their own AI agents to build charts and dashboards and investigate root causes, and announcing scheduled reports that deliver filtered, tabbed dashboards. Its GitHub organization shows active 2026 development on Agor (an agentic team command center), agor-teammate, agent-skills for Superset/Preset MCP across multiple AI coding assistants, and testmcpy, a framework for testing LLM tool calling against MCP services for Superset operations.