Chartbeat Raises $3 Million From Index, Conway, Sacca, Clavier, Lerer, And Dixon

In a short amount of time since its launch in April, 2009 and its redesign a year later, realtime analytics startup Chartbeat has gained an impressive following of more than 2,500 paying corporate customers. All of this was done so far with 5 employees, led by general manager Tony Haile.

Now, the betaworks-incubated company has gained an impressive roster of investors in a $3 million Series A financing. The round was led by Index Ventures, and includes some serious superangels such as Ron Conway’s SV Angel, Chris Sacca’s Lowercase Capital, Chris Dixon’s Founder Collective, Lerer Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, Freestyle Capital, betaworks, Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC, and Jason Calacanis. With the funding, Chartbeat will be spun off as its own separate company, just as betawork’s bit.ly was before it.

Chartbeat gives you a realtime dashboard that shows you the activity on your Website as it happens: what stories, pages, or items are hot; where traffic is coming from, how fast your pages are loading. “Understanding what is going on with your business in realtime and being able to respond to that, we believe is the future of online business,” says Index partner Saul Klein.

Chartbeat is especially popular with publishers and retailers. We use Chartbeat at TechCrunch every day. I always have a tab open to see what stories are gaining the most traction. Other publishers who use it include the New York Times, AOL, Starbucks, and Groupon. Gawker is testing a beta site where feature stories are determined by their Chartbeat stats.

Today Chartbeat helps people monitor their sites, but the next step is to help them take actions based on the realtime data. Giving businesses actionable data and helping them take those action sis where the real value in this business lies—whether that is tying Chartbeat into an ad server throw more ads at hot stories, or linking it to a realtime merchandising and inventory systems for retailers.

A month ago, Chartbeat passed one million concurrent active visitors across all the sites using the service. That number is now regularly past 1.5 million. The dial below shows the cumulative active visitors across all Chartbeat-enabled sites.