From 100 articles per day to 150,000. From blind spots to real-time, self-serve analytics.

• Ad Fontes Media is the creator of the Media Bias Chart, rating 14,000+ news sources for reliability and political bias.
• Data-as-a-service business with ~40 human analysts and ML/LLM pipelines processing 150,000 articles daily.
• Customers include enterprise clients and academic researchers studying the media’s impact on social outcomes.

• Every data request required an engineer to write a custom SQL query or build a one-off UI, pulling resources from product work.
• Leadership often chose not to ask for data to avoid burdening the engineering team, creating organizational blind spots.
• Legacy BI tools (Tableau, Power BI) were evaluated and rejected: too expensive, too complex, and too slow for a lean startup handling large data volumes.
• Could not measure inter-rater reliability, model drift, or run ad hoc accuracy tests at speed.

• Speed: New dashboards and reports spin up in minutes, not days.
• Flexibility: Fully customizable queries, tables, and dashboards, built exactly the way the team needs them.
• Cost: No per-query or per-row penalties. A pricing model that respects startup economics.
• Zoë (AI Data Analyst): Non-technical team members can explore data independently, eliminating the engineering bottleneck.
• Intuitive onboarding: The team was productive quickly with minimal ramp-up time.

• 1,500x scale increase in daily article processing (100 to 150,000) enabled by Zenlytic by Chord’s data infrastructure.
• Self-serve analytics for every team member: CEO, product, QA, and data teams all access data independently.
• AI model validation at enterprise grade: Model Drift dashboards compare human, ML, and LLM scores in real time.
• Enterprise credibility unlocked: Live dashboards used to pass third-party vendor assessments and close contracts.
• Engineering hours reclaimed: Data team refocused on pipeline and product work instead of ad hoc reporting.

“To be able to say that our AI model is approximately as accurate as our human ratings, with confidence to a customer, is really important. And you have to have the data to actually back it up. I can show them my dashboard.”