About 5000fish
The small, independent company behind Yurbi and DashboardFox.
5000fish, Inc. has been building business intelligence software since the company was formed in 2009 — on engineering, discipline, and a team that go back to 1999. Two products. One philosophy: data tools that respect the people who use them.
How we got here.
It started in 1999 as a small consulting firm called OakTree Enterprise Solutions, Inc., focused on getting better reporting out of Computer Associates' enterprise platforms. Every customer wanted the same thing — answers from their data without writing custom code every time — so we built a product to give it to them. OakTree Navigator launched at CA World, signed roughly twenty US Army customers that first week, and that was the moment we stopped being a consulting firm and started being a software company.
Through the early 2000s the product expanded beyond Computer Associates — HP, BMC, NetIQ — and eventually beyond enterprise management platforms entirely, becoming a BI tool that ran on any relational database. By 2009, it was clear the software needed to be its own thing. We split it off, named the new company 5000fish, rebranded the product as Yurbi, and moved it to the web. That's the company you're talking to today.
Eleven years later, in 2020, we launched DashboardFox — same engineering team, same core engine, designed for internal teams and agencies instead of ISV embedding. Two products now, one philosophy. Bootstrapped from day one. The same small team. The roadmap is set by customers, not by an investor's quarterly meeting. And the operating discipline — quietly, deliberately, across both companies — is to make data tools that respect the people using them.
Five chapters across two companies.
The product changed. The platform changed. The name changed. The mission didn't: give people who need data a tool they can actually use.
- 1999
OakTree Enterprise Solutions — the first semantic layer
We started as a Computer Associates consulting firm. Every CA customer wanted the same thing: custom reports from their enterprise tools. We stopped building one-offs and built a product — OakTree Navigator, a semantic layer over CA's database. We took a booth at CA World, announced it, and signed roughly twenty US Army customers that week.
- Early 2000s
Beyond CA — the AnyDB realization
We expanded to HP, BMC, NetIQ, and others. Every conversation kept circling back to the same question: "Can you do this against our database?" That was the insight. We rebuilt the semantic layer to sit on top of any relational database. The product you can download today started there.
- 2009
5000fish, Inc. is formed — Yurbi launches
We split the software off from OakTree into a dedicated company and named it 5000fish — small loaves, big crowd, you know the story. We rebranded the product as Yurbi, moved it to the web, and started selling to ISVs who needed embedded analytics inside their own products. Government, healthcare, finance, education.
- 2020
DashboardFox launches
Same engine, different use case. Teams kept telling us they needed BI for their own organization or their clients — not embedded inside a SaaS product. So we built DashboardFox: cloud or on-premise, subscription or one-time license, white-label included on every plan. The kind of BI tool we wished existed when we were small.
- Now
v12. .NET 10. Two products. One team.
We ship weekly. We run on Docker, Linux, and Windows. We migrated to .NET 10. We've done major UX generations while keeping every customer's data, configuration, and reports intact across versions. Two products, one codebase lineage, zero outside investors.
What 25 years of BI has taught us.
The hard parts of business intelligence aren't the charts. They're the problems below the surface — and they're the ones we've spent decades solving for government agencies, health systems, banks and software vendors.
Every customer sees only their own data.
Multi-tenant security enforced at the query layer, so one installation can safely serve every one of your customers — the foundation of embedded analytics done right.
Your data stays where it is.
Our products query your databases directly — SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle and more — with no ETL pipeline or data warehouse to build first.
It runs where you need it to.
Our cloud in the US or EU, your own servers on Windows, Linux or Docker, or fully air-gapped networks where nothing gets in or out.
Upgrades never break your reports.
We've been through multiple platform generations — now .NET 10 — while keeping every customer's data, configuration and reports intact from version to version.
What's up with the fish?
A small amount, used well, goes a long way.
The name 5000fish comes from the Feeding of the 5000 — the biblical story where a few loaves and fish, blessed and broken, fed a crowd that should have gone home hungry.
It's a story about limited resources doing more than they look like they should when applied with intention. That idea stuck with us when we were choosing a name for a small, bootstrapped software company. It still does.
From a small amount, applied with care, you can do amazing things. That's our operating philosophy as a small bootstrapped company — and the reason the name still fits us a quarter-century in.
A few resources, used well, go a long way. That's been the whole operating philosophy — through the OakTree years, through the spin-off into 5000fish in 2009, and every day since. It's not a metaphor we picked up later. It's the entire reason we exist.
Four things you can hold us to.
How the company has actually run since the OakTree years — with evidence you can point to.
Lost deals ship features.
When a trial doesn't convert, we ask why. When a demo stalls on one capability, we write it down. Most of what's in both products today traces back to someone who didn't buy — and told us exactly why. Every exit teaches us something.
Talk to the people who built it.
There's no tier-1 deflection queue. There's no outsourced support. When you reach out — sales, support, or just a question — the engineer who actually wrote the code answers. Usually within a business day. Often the same day.
Weekly builds, not annual roadmaps.
We don't plan features 18 months out and ship them in a big-bang release. We learn on Monday and ship on Friday. Feedback you give us this week often shows up in the product the next. v12 didn't happen in a sprint — it happened across hundreds of weeks of small improvements.
Same team that built the foundation.
The people building Yurbi and DashboardFox today are the same people who built the foundation across the OakTree and early 5000fish years. That continuity is why a customer who started with us in 2010 still recognizes the product in 2026.
5000fish, Inc. is bootstrapped. No venture capital. No outside investors. No one pushing us toward an exit.
A note from the founder
I've been building BI tools since 1999. I'm still doing it for the same reason I started.
The existing options back then were either too expensive or too complex for normal businesses. Enterprise vendors charged a fortune and required dedicated IT staff. New "modern" BI tools layer on complexity in the name of flexibility. Twenty-five years later, the problem most teams have is still the same: they just want answers from their data, without it becoming a project.
I'm here every day. I read customer email. I sign every contract personally. That's not heroic — it's just how a small bootstrapped company works when nobody's pressuring it to grow at all costs. We've stayed small on purpose. The work we're proud of has come from that choice, not in spite of it.
We're a services company at heart that happens to make software. When something's broken, you reach the engineers who built it. When you tell us something's missing, we write it down. That's the whole loop. It's not complicated. We just don't stop doing it.
David FergusonCEO & Founder, 5000fish
Connect on LinkedInTwo products. One philosophy.
Same engineering team. Same operating values. Different jobs to do.
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