Y Combinator-backed analytics startup Mixpanel can now add Andreessen Horowitz to an already-impressive list of investors.
Mixpanel previously raised $1.75 million from Sequoia Capital, Square COO Keith Rabois, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, and Bebo co-founder Michael Birch. Now Andreessen Horowitz has led a $10.25 million Series A, with participation from Levchin, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, and Yammer CEO David Sacks. (Co-founder Suhail Doshi says Mixpanel chose Andreessen Horowitz over other firms, including Sequoia, which did not have pro rata in the deal.) Andreessen Horowitz’s Peter Levine is joining the company’s board.
“We’ve watched Suhail and his team at Mixpanel transform the company from an innovative startup to one that delivers the most advanced solution we’ve seen for mobile and web analytics,” Levine says in the press release.
Doshi has pitched Mixpanel as an affordable, innovative alternative to old-school analytics companies like Omniture. Back in February, he told me that Mixpanel was tracking 4 billion actions for its customers each month. Less than three months later, Doshi says that number is now more than 7 billion. A lot of that growth has been on the mobile side. In fact, Doshi claims that aside from Instagram, most of the high-profile, hit smartphone apps use Mixpanel. Two new customers include Path and Viddy — and since Socialcam was already a customer, that means Mixpanel is serving the two big apps duking it out for dominance of mobile video sharing.
The next big update to the product will involve making Mixpanel data more actionable, Doshi says — so, for example, instead of just helping gaming companies identify which players are “whales” (i.e., the biggest spenders), it will also help them figure out what to do with that knowledge. Doshi also says he wants to start spending a lot more aggressively on recruiting employees. That’s a normal part of the plan when a company raises money, but Doshi lays out a particularly ambitious vision.
“Not only do we want to spoil our current employees, but we think we can out-compete Google and Facebook in terms of making it an awesome place to work,” he says.
Mixpanel is the most advanced analytics platform for mobile & web. It helps businesses grow by helping them understand how their users behave and use their products by tracking actions people take rather than page views. Mixpanel’s mission is to help the world learn from its data.
Andreessen Horowitz is a $2.5 billion venture capital firm that was launched on July 6, 2009. Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, John O’Farrell, Scott Weiss, Jeff Jordan, and Peter Levine are the general partners of the firm.
Max Levchin the founder and CEO of Slide, which creates and distributes popular Web applications on Facebook, as desktop widgets, and elsewhere. He is also the chairman of local review site Yelp. Prior to Slide he was the co-founder and CTO of PayPal, which was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002.
Marc Benioff is chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. He founded the company in 1999 with a vision to create an on-demand information management service that would replace traditional enterprise software technology. Benioff is regarded as the leader of what he has termed “The End of Software,” the now-proven belief that multi-tenant, on-demand applications democratize information by delivering immediate benefits at reduced risks and costs. Under Benioff’s direction, salesforce.com has grown from a groundbreaking idea into a publicly traded company that...
David O. Sacks is the Founder and CEO of Yammer, Inc. Sacks was previously the COO of PayPal until its acquisition by eBay. Subsequently, he founded Geni.com, a family tree building and networking website. He also produced and financed the hit movie Thank You For Smoking. David recently sold Yammer to Microsoft for $1.2 billion. David holds a B.A. in Economics from Stanford University and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School.
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