Narrator

Narrator was a New York data software company focused on self-service analytics, customer journey modeling and automated business intelligence. Founded in 2017, it developed tools that helped data teams organize customer interactions and enabled business users to explore that information without manually building SQL models for each question.

Its central contribution was the Activity Schema, an open data modeling specification that represents business interactions as a single time-series table of customer activities. Events such as transactions and other customer interactions could be organized into a consistent structure, providing a foundation for customer 360 analysis and journey exploration. This approach offered an alternative to traditional star schemas and the synchronization work associated with maintaining multiple analytical models.

Platform and capabilities

The platform combined warehouse-native transformations, temporal joins and automated analysis to help users define customer journeys, assemble datasets and generate narrative reports. Its tooling supported Snowflake, BigQuery and Redshift, connecting its modeling approach with established cloud data warehouse environments. Narrator also addressed warehouse query efficiency and compute costs as part of its analytical offering.

For data teams, the platform provided a reusable foundation for behavioral and time-series analysis. For business users, it offered a self-service way to ask questions using the same underlying customer data. Its commercial work included deployments for CBS, PBS, Beyond Yoga, HER and AppFolio, spanning media, retail and software businesses.

Company history

Narrator participated in Y Combinator’s Summer 2019 accelerator programme and operated as an independent, venture-backed company. Commercial operations wound down in late 2024 and early 2025. In early 2025, the team released the complete platform codebase under the MIT license, making its implementation publicly available while stating that the project was no longer actively maintained. Y Combinator subsequently listed the company as inactive. The released software and Activity Schema specification remain part of its public technical legacy.