For growing companies that run on data

Smarter data.
Stronger outcomes.

We're the data partner growing companies call when spreadsheets stop being enough — architecting the pipelines, models, and governance that turn raw operational data into decisions your team can act on this week.

Microsoft-native. Fluent across the modern data stack.
Solutions

Five practices. One operating model.

From a focused sprint to a multi-year platform build — engagements are partner-led by senior practitioners who've built data infrastructure at companies just like yours.

01

Data engineering & pipelines

Streaming and batch infrastructure for your operational, transactional, and product data — observable, idempotent, and built to last.

  • dbt
  • Airflow
  • Spark
  • Kafka
02

Analytics, BI & AI

Customer 360, executive dashboards, and next-best-action models — with a metric layer your entire leadership team can trust.

  • Customer 360
  • Power BI
  • NBA models
  • ML
03

Governance & strategy

Catalogs, lineage, data contracts, and access controls — operating-model design that keeps your business compliant without slowing engineers down.

  • Purview
  • Unity Catalog
  • Data contracts
  • Compliance
04

Cloud architecture

Microsoft Fabric, Azure Synapse, and Databricks lakehouses — sized for mid-market budgets, hardened for compliance, portable across clouds.

  • Azure
  • Fabric
  • Synapse
  • IaC
05

Staffing augmentation

Embedded engineers and analysts who run alongside your team day-to-day. Atlanta-led, with a senior delivery bench in India — and your data never leaves your US Azure tenant.

  • Data eng
  • Analytics
  • BI
  • Hybrid delivery
How we work

A three-act engagement,
refined across every delivery.

We don't ship discovery decks. Every phase produces working software, decisions on the record, and a path your team can run on their own once we're gone.

01
Discover

Listen, audit, name the real problem

We embed with your team, map every data source, interview the people who live in them, and write a brief everyone can argue with.

You get
Architecture brief · risks · roadmap
02
Architect

Design the system on paper, then in code

We prototype the spine — schemas, data contracts, infra-as-code — until every choice is visible and the path to production is clear.

You get
Working prototype · decision log · cost model
03
Deliver

Ship, train, and hand off the keys

We run alongside your team until production is boring, then transfer ownership with runbooks, tests, and documentation — not a dependency on us.

You get
Production system · enabled team
Current focus

Real work.
Real clients.

Our anchor clients run on embedded delivery — senior engineers and analysts plugged in day-to-day. Alongside client work, we build reusable accelerators our network can deploy.

Active engagement · Staff augmentation

Operational data lived in seven places. Dashboards were built and rebuilt — never quite trusted because the numbers never agreed.

Live since 2024

Embedded data-engineering and analytics team for a mid-size financial institution. Unified operational, transactional, and product data into a governed lakehouse — then built the customer 360, executive dashboards, and campaign analytics the business actually trusts.

ANCHOR CLIENT · UNDER NDA Ask for a reference
Live · Free Tool

A credit union's story is scattered across NCUA Call Reports, HMDA mortgage data, Census demographics, FDIC deposits, and labor data — six public datasets no executive has time to stitch together.

4,400+ credit unions

Credit Union Intelligence — a free suite that turns public data into decisions. Search any credit union for a plain-English State of Your Credit Union report — financial health, balance sheet, members, market whitespace. Then drop a pin on the market analysis map: demographics, bank-deposit landscape, market momentum, and every CU branch within any radius.

NCUA · HMDA · CENSUS · FDIC · BLS · IRS Look up a credit union
Case Study · Data Warehouse POC

Your core banking system, lending platform, mortgage servicer, and origination system generate data that never meets. Every answer requires a different login.

~$950M portfolio unified

A production-grade credit union data warehouse — core banking, consumer lending, mortgage servicing, and originations unified into a single star schema. 31 dbt models, 35 automated tests, four live executive dashboards.

CREDIT UNION DW · OPEN SOURCE POC Read the case study
About the firm

We're practitioners, not just advisors.

Founder & Principal
Chinmay Gandhi
Data & BI Architecture

The Data Element was founded in 2022 by engineers who'd spent a decade inside data teams that kept getting promised transformation but never got the infrastructure to back it up. We started the firm we wished had shown up.

Today we operate out of Atlanta, GA — architects, analytics engineers, BI developers, and governance specialists. Every engagement is led by someone who writes code on the project and can trace your data from source to dashboard.

Our clients span financial services, operations, and technology — from credit unions and community banks to logistics and SaaS companies building their first data platform.

Ready to make your data work harder?

Send a two-sentence note. We'll reply with whether we can help — and a real engineer on the call within the week.

Book a call