Following significant Australian growth, data storytelling platform Nugit has appointed former BuzzFeed sales chief David Nemes as its first country manager.

Nugit allows enterprises, agencies, publishers and tech companies to automatically transform their data into shareable and interactive data stories. It has reported a fivefold growth since launching in Australia last July.

Nemes was BuzzFeed Australia’s first sales head joining in 2015 to lead commercial operations across Asia Pacific with responsibility for revenue, client services, creative and advertising operations. Prior to BuzzFeed he spent almost six years at LinkedIn joining as part of the foundation team in APAC leading the technology vertical before being promoted to head of enterprise for their marketing solutions business.

Clients including Kellogg’s, Wired Agency and Resolution Media have joined Nugit since launching in Australia, with existing clients including Johnson & Johnson, Audi and HealthEngine expanding their use of the platform.

Australian entrepreneur David Sanderson, who founded Singapore headquartered Nugit said of Nemes’ appointment: “Australian businesses are still drowning in data. Dashboards have proven to be a poor substitute to data storytelling, but there’s not a lot of options to achieve this without the burden on analytics teams. Our technology is built to address this problem. We’re excited to have someone with David’s track record and passion for what we’re doing on the ground ready to help every Australian business become a great data storytelling business. We welcome him to the team.”

As country manager for Australia and New Zealand, Nemes will continue to build Nugit’s market presence, drive commercial growth and build out the local team with a client services manager to be appointed in the coming months.

Nemes added: “I’m very excited to be joining the Nugit team. They’ve built an amazing product that I wish I had access to in my previous roles. With the amount of data that companies are now gathering, it’s more important than ever to have the right tools to make sure people across the business can not only access this data but also make sense of it, quickly.”

Nugit’s Australia expansion comes as the tech startup boosts its presence in the UK, appointing former Publicis and Mindshare executive Greg Fortune as country lead.

The Nugit platform integrates directly with over 30 data technologies including Adobe Analytics, Facebook Ads, Google Ads, MOAT, Instagram, and LinkedIn and uses artificial intelligence to create shareable visual data stories at speed. The enterprise version allows companies to add internal and third-party data via a universal data connector.