Empirical Systems

Empirical Systems and Democratizing Statistics for Everyone

Every organization has a mountain of structured data—spreadsheets, tables, operational records—and only a small handful of people qualified to analyze it rigorously. Real statistical analysis, the kind that detects relationships between variables, explains anomalies, and infers missing values, has traditionally required a trained statistician. Everyone else was left eyeballing charts and hoping to see signals and trends.

Spun out of the MIT by Richard Tibbetts (previously co-founder of StreamBase, acquired by TIBCO) and Madeleine Thompson, Empirical was established to build an automated statistician. The team developed an analytics engine that automatically modeled structured, tabular data using sophisticated probabilistic techniques. The engine surfaced correlations, outliers, and patterns in real time—automating analysis that would otherwise require deep statistical expertise and excelling in sparse, "small data" situations where standard machine learning fails.

Exit Journey

Empirical's technology fit squarely into the industry's race to bring AI-powered analysis to non-technical users. In 2018, Tableau Software acquired Empirical Systems to embed automated statistical insight directly into its visual analytics platform, establishing a new Tableau R&D center in Cambridge, MA around the team. Empirical embodies the Hyperplane focus that frontier research and passionate, technical founders become highly strategic assets.

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