LightningChart celebrates its 10th anniversary!

The LightningChart Journey (before Arction).

– letter from our CEO, Pasi Tuomainen, written in honor of the anniversary

Back to 2007, I was working with medical device manufacturer over a decade, struggling with commercial charting components and their insufficient performance level… something needed to be done. The ultimate performance requirements came from EEG applications: dozens of traces in real-time, with high data rate. It was clear that GDI-based Windows graphics wasn’t up to the task and GPU-assisted acceleration should have been used. There was nothing available in the charting component industry at that time.

I saw a market potential for a real high-performance charting tool. In the end of 2007, I founded LightningChart Ltd by myself and started to subcontract and use more and more time for researching different technologies to make data visualization faster. The first steps were quite frightening: all GPU types worked differently, had different capabilities, drivers were buggy, and documentation was niche. DirectX 9 was the graphics API I started to work with. I wrote real-time scrolling modes, efficient line rendering routines and charting objects for advanced medical and measurement industry applications.

I hired our first employee, now LightningChart’s Lead Architect, just before releasing LightningChart v.1 in end of 2009. In order to pay a salary to him (as I had almost 0 income during a year), I was forced to find a temporary investor to start marketing activities. We were able to get LightningChart sales to a level to support hiring more professionals in development, testing, marketing, sales and especially support.

LightningChart has evolved pretty much customer-driven. Close communication with customers, and providing solutions they ask for, have been always important for us. Thousands of customers all around the world, including many of the largest companies, trust in our services.

Adding more visualization types and features in LightningChart, improving performance and advancing configurability, we have grown the LightningChart codebase to approximately 1 million lines of code. It now has over 4000 public properties to configure the chart and hundreds of code examples; it is capable of plotting thousands of real-time feeds, exceeding 1 billion data points capacity in line plots.

That was a huge effort, and in overall, I think LightningChart should be a little bit proud of the 10-year journey. I am proud.

 

Thank you, Customers! Thank you, Partners! Thank you, Team!

arction team

LightningChart team, October 2017