Show the working
If a user cannot inspect how we got a number, we have not finished building the feature.
About
The person with the question should get the answer
We spent years watching good decisions wait on a queue. Axiom exists to shorten that queue to nothing.
Every company we worked at had the same bottleneck. Someone in operations or finance needed a number. The number lived in a warehouse only three people could query. Those three people had a backlog. By the time the answer arrived, the decision had already been made on instinct.
The usual fix is a dashboard. Someone builds one, it answers last quarter's question, and within a month it is answering nobody's. The underlying problem is not that people lack charts. It is that the question they have today is never quite the question the dashboard was built for.
What we decided to build
Axiom is built on one assumption: if a non-technical person can express their question clearly in English, a machine can turn that into SQL — and the person should be able to read that SQL before they trust the answer.
Showing the query is not a feature we added for analysts. It is what makes the answer defensible to everyone else.
That one decision shaped everything after it. We do not copy your data into our own store. We do not reimplement your permissions. We do not hide the query. If Axiom cannot show its working, it should not be trusted, and we would rather build a product that earns trust than one that asks for it.
How we work
We are a small, remote, deliberately unhurried team. We ship on Tuesdays, we answer our own support tickets, and we publish a changelog every time something changes. We have no sales development representatives and no plans to hire any.
How we decide
Four rules we argue from
Borrow permissions, never invent them
A second permissions model is a second thing to get wrong. We inherit yours instead.
Eleven minutes or it is broken
If a new customer cannot reach a real answer inside their first session, that is a bug in the product, not in their patience.
Viewers are free, forever
Charging per reader punishes exactly the behavior we are trying to create. We will not do it.
Team
Nine people, six time zones
Dana Whitfield
Co-founder, Product
Arno Fischer
Co-founder, Engineering
Priya Raman
Head of Data
Kwame Boateng
Security
Come and break it
We would rather you found the rough edges in a free trial than in a procurement process.