Show HN: Velvet – Data platform with an AI SQL editor

Show HN: Velvet – Data platform with an AI SQL editor(usevelvet.com)

9 points by chrisjh 2 years ago | 3 comments

Hi HN — Chris here, Velvet co-founder. I’m excited to share what we’ve been working on, a platform to unify disparate data sources into a single queryable interface.

We built Velvet to solve our own problem. We’re a small team and wanted to combine the data from various services (Stripe, Supabase, etc.) into a layer that would help us make product decisions and ship new features faster.

On the surface, it may look like a simple text-to-SQL data notebook. But under the hood, it’s an accessible and interoperable backend-as-a-service that your entire product team can utilize. Connect to your databases, sync third-party APIs, capture webhook events — then write data directly, spinning up queues and analytics databases on the fly.

The magic of our tool is in unifying data sources into a native SQL layer. We leverage ClickHouse to enable you to write joins across datasets you’ve never been able to pair together before (without significant effort). We layer on an iterative SQL query interface to help you write and refine queries with the assistance of AI.

Our product works great for individual contributors and solo devs, but we’ve also built in collaboration features so data access doesn’t get siloed.

Your saved queries can be turned into API endpoints and used directly in feature development. This makes the workflow of shipping new features really fast! Ping me if you want to early access to this feature.

Watch our video demo (https://youtu.be/CW5TXMCyfC0) and try the live demo in our app. Feel free to email me directly (chris@usevelvet.com) with questions and feedback.

Thanks for checking out Velvet!

gavry 2 years ago |

Ahh this is awesome. The AI-powered query builder => API endpoint feature sounds like the biggest win for me.

Any plans in the future for having these exposed via an OpenAPI schema (that could then be used to introspect / generate clients with)? Would be awesome to make it super easy for frontend engineers to create their own endpoints and then automatically be able to use them in their app!

(or is that possibly already a feature?)

Best of luck, and will keep a tab on this

philip1209 2 years ago |

My understanding is that Velvet is like a "Supabase for data warehouses," sitting somewhere between Amplitude and Snowflake. Is that right? How does it compare to each of those?

chrisjh 2 years ago | |

We like the “Supabase for data engineering” nomenclature — we’re a managed service that does the heavy lifting to unify your data sources. Velvet enables you to join volumes of product events (from sources like Amplitude or Snowflake) with your application database(s) and query them directly in an accessible way. Plus, use your Velvet queries as interoperable building blocks to collaborate and build features within your product via our API.