Keen IO, a startup that helps developers build their own analytics products, is announcing that it has raised $11.3 million in Series A funding.
Co-founder and CEO Kyle Wild told me that when the company started talking about raising more funding, its previous backers offered to fund the new round on their own. However, since Sequoia capital’s Aaref Hilaly had already reached out, Wild said he checked in to see if the firm wanted to participate, but under one condition — that there was a signed term sheet within two weeks.
“A lot of firms said they couldn’t do it, but for the next two weeks, on every business day, we were engaged with Sequoia,” Wild said.
So Sequoia ended up leading the round, with Hilaly joining Keen IO’s board of directors. Existing investors Pelion, Amplify, and Rincon, Cloud Power Capital, and Morris Wheeler also participated in the new funding.
When I spoke to Wild about the company’s seed funding last fall, he said the Keen IO platform is aimed at businesses who can’t get the specific data they want from existing analytics tools, but they either can’t or don’t want to build their own analytics infrastructure. The company allows customers to gather data from any source, store it, and visualize it in any way they want.
Wild said yesterday that the fastest-growing part of Keen IO’s customer base comes from the “Internet of things”, i.e., Internet-connected gadgets (here’s a writeup of how smartwatch Pebble using the platform), while the biggest revenue source has been ad tech. Ultimately, Wild said he hopes to see Keen IO used very broadly — while there have been some criticisms in the vein of, “Oh man, your customers have to write code?” he said the team has a different perspective: “We look at it, as our customers get to write code, so they don’t have to solve the problem our way.”
In a blog post about the funding, Wild said Keen IO has seen 300 percent growth in data volume this year, and that the number grew 50 percent month over month in April alone.
Wild added that the new funding will go toward marketing, and toward continued product development, including more work on open source projects that can “demonstrate what can be done” with the Keen IO platform.