Segment, a Y Combinator-backed startup that allows businesses to use a single API for event tracking in order to send data to hundreds of different tools and databases, including Google Analytics, MailChimp, KISSmetrics, Omniture, Mixpanel, Quantcast, Flurry, and much more, today announced an additional $27 million in Series B funding, led by Thrive Capital. Existing investors Accel Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Jon Winkelried, former president of Goldman Sachs, also participated.
In addition to the new capital, Will Gaybrick, CFO of Stripe and G.P. at Thrive Capital, will join Segment’s board.
The company had previously raised $15 million from Accel and others last year, and says it will now double its headcount to 100, following this round’s close.
The service itself is popular among engineers, because its saves time on implementing the various tracking services that are popular today – instead of having to figure out how to configure a given API from a provider, Segment’s customers basically toggle a switch. This is not only useful for the more complicated integrations that come from having to work with older APIs based on SOAP XML instead of REST, but it’s also beneficial to company’s bottom line because it means developers can spend more time working on product instead of API integrations.
Founded by Peter Reinhardt, Ilya Volodarsky, Ian Storm Taylor, and Calvin French-Owen, three of whom started off as roommates while at MIT, Segment participated in Y Combinator’s summer 2011 program. Initially, the team was building a competitor to Google Analytics or KISSmetrics, but they had also built a library called Analytics.js that wrapped all the analytic services and APIs together.
They released an open source version of this library on GitHub, and it just started growing by itself. That forced them to reconsider their focus. What people actually wanted, as it turned out, was a simple analytics API.
Today, Segment is being used by a number of companies, including Conde Nast, Bonobos, and HotelTonight, and is processing 50 billion API calls per month. On average, its customers send data to at least 5 services, with enterprise customers sending data to 11 partner applications, on average. In the past few months, Segment says it has added 30 more partners who built their own integrations for Segment’s platform.
Segment’s user base doubled in the past year, and it now has 4,000 active customers – meaning those who have at least three connections and are sending Segment data. While the company is not disclosing details of its revenues, it did say revenue tripled in the past 8 months. Usage, accordingly, is up as well – Segment now processes as much data in a day as it did in a month last year.
Customers can also use Segment to query the complete set of customer data, by allowing Segment to load the data from websites and apps right into Amazon Redshift. Going forward, the company plans to connect to other data warehousing services, too, like Postgres, MySQL and others.
Currently, the company offers 160 integrations across 20 categories, and now plans to use the funding to expand to more popular data storage platforms, and capture more customer data beyond the in-app behavior it tracks today.
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