InfoActive, a former FounderFuel company that simplifies data visualization, has been acquired by Seattle-based Tableau Software.

The two companies are similar in that they’re both devoted to helping people see and understand data, with Tableau having achieved more success and notoriety. A spokesperson for InfoActive declined to reveal the value of the acquisition.

Tableau (NYSE: DATA) helps anyone quickly analyze, visualize and share information. More than 32,000 businesses call themselves customers, with tens of thousands of people use Tableau Public to share data in their blogs and websites.

“The Infoactive team will be a great addition to the Tableau family,” said Dave Story, VP of Mobile and Strategic Growth at Tableau. “Their experience in data and design as well as building mobile and cloud sharing products will be a great asset to our development team.”

InfoActive, led by CEO Trina Chaisson, helps people turn live data into mobile-friendly, interactive infographics. It won the award for Best Bootstrap Company at SXSW in 2013, followed by a successful Kickstarter campaign later that year. The company launched its first public beta in 2014.

“Our goal at Infoactive was to blend our passion for data and design to help people make sense of information,” said Trina Chiasson, CEO of Infoactive. “We’ve always admired Tableau’s mission to help people see and understand data and we’re thrilled to work together to pursue our shared vision.”

The company was part of a growing trend towards understanding the mass amounts of data that web-based software companies are constantly churning out, in an effort to understand how customers are behaving. Ideally, with a strong grasp on the data that one’s website produces, one can make better decisions and ultimately make more money. It’s all part of general shift to web-based software over the last five years. The world’s data is projected to grow 50 times over the next decade, and with this advance in “big data” comes a need for improved data understanding. Presenting information in a meaningful way, through charts and infographics showing trends over time, is crucial. That’s what InfoActive is doing.

in 2014, Chaisson was a fellow at the Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI), a prestigious department of the University of Missouri. RJI engages media professionals, scholars and other citizens in programs aimed at strengthening journalism in the service of democracy. Chaisson’s work at RJI focused on small news rooms, and how they use data visualizations in the context of data exploration, when they’re creating interactive data visualizations to help readers explore complex data sets.

Meanwhile, Tableau Public’s new landing page was ready for an expected influx of InfoActive users Tuesday.

Here at Tableau, our mission is to help people see and understand their data. With Tableau Public, we offer a free and powerful visual analytics platform that enables you to create, publish and share interactive dashboards and data stories on the web.

Since it was launched in 2010, Tableau Public has been used by over 100,000 bloggers, journalists, researchers and students to create, publish and discover over 500,000 data stories that have been viewed over half a billion times by readers around the world. Publications like Wall Street Journal, La Nacion and CNBC use Tableau Public for their data visualizations.

Tableau Public is completely free to download and use, and we recently made our premium features free for all account holders as well. The ability to protect your underlying data, 10GB of storage and connection to 10 million rows of data are all yours to put to good use.

So we invite you to try Tableau Public today, and we are always available at [email protected] if you have any questions.

Happy Vizzing!

The Tableau Public Team

@tableau