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Data Drum was conceived in Venezuela in 2014 when Girish Gupta, a freelance investigative and multimedia journalist, wanted to properly understand—and help others understand—the country's economic and humanitarian crisis.

Disaster Data: Journalist's New App Sheds Light On Venezuela's Economic Catastrophe

Harnessing data to understand a spectacular economic meltdown

In Venezuela, Girish watched people fight outside supermarkets for pasta, wade through rivers smuggling eggs across to Colombia and lob petrol bombs and rocks at security forces who fought back with tear gas and rubber bullets. He saw salaries fall to $1 a month amid crippling hyperinflation. Girish, who has a Master's degree in physics, wanted to understand the crisis from first principles so wrote the first lines of code for what became Data Drum.

Data Drum's principles are that public data should be accessible to the public and that no one should have to waste time doing what can be done by good code.

Central banks and government statistics agencies obfuscate what should be transparent data in a myriad of formats, structures and languages. Citizens don’t even bother to look at the data and rely on reporters and those with their own agendas to get the facts. Professionals waste hours every day parsing archaic websites, jumbled PDFs and unclear spreadsheets in order to incorporate what they find into their own workflows.

Data Drum automates everything and so sweeps away those mind-numbing and time-sapping tasks. We present the world’s data with style and structure.

The intuitive website and mobile apps allow quick viewing and downloading of live figures alongside elegant visualizations and informative text. The Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets add-ins put live data straight into spreadsheets. Advanced users can also pull straight from the API.

Data Drum also offers the platform as a white label product.

Data Drum has already appeared in or been cited by the New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, CBC, Miami Herald, Times of London and JPMorgan—and received Standalone press coverage from others for shining a light on Venezuela’s economic crisis.

Data Drum, Inc., is a Delaware-registered C corporation, owned by founder and CEO Girish Gupta.

Any questions? Send an email.