Twilio Segment Raises $15 Million Series A

Today we have some exciting news to share with you! Segment has raised a $15 million Series A from Accel, Kleiner Perkins and e.ventures. This new funding means we get to invest heavily in our mission: making your customer data a joy to use!

Back in December 2012 we launched Analytics.js, our open-source library to make installing analytics easy. From that very first post on Hacker News, your feedback has led us to build server-side libraries, mobile SDKs, ecommerce plugins, raw data access, historical replay, and over a 100 new integrations—all designed to make using customer data a joy rather than an engineering headache. Today, you can collect your data wherever it’s generated and route it wherever you need it to go with the flip of a switch.

Traditionally, teams have had to make difficult choices when it comes to managing their customer data. They might choose individual best-in-class tools, but then spend months evaluating and integrating them all. Or a team might integrate once with a single “monolithic” solution like Adobe SiteCatalyst or Salesforce, but then realize a jack of all trades is the master of none.

At Segment, we believe that businesses shouldn’t have to choose. Our hub model has the low integration cost of monolithic suites, but connects you with an entire ecosystem of specialized, best-in-class tools to make your data incredibly powerful. Your data should go with you wherever you want, whenever you want.

Over 4,000 companies are now using Segment as their customer data hub. Their engineering teams have saved an enormous amount of time and energy, while simultaneously giving their marketing and analytics teams a huge competitive advantage: the flexibility to build the best marketing stack possible. We take great joy in knowing that our customers are able to focus their teams on buildingincredible products, rather than wasting months pushing data around.

But there’s still a huge amount of work left to do.

First, there are hundreds of integrations to build for you. Your combined hunger for specialized data tools in every niche is voracious. We have 117 integrations today, but we have nearly 200 additional requests in our backlog. With our new funding we’ll be adding integrations faster than ever, giving you instant access to the best and newest tools in every niche.

Second, it’s still too painful to collect basic customer data. The new funding will help us bring you better ways to plan and manage your customer data, and even easier ways to implement tracking. Stay tuned here, we’re incredibly excited about this!

Third, every one of our partners has to rebuild an enormous amount of infrastructure to collect the same customer data. They each have to rethink the schema for the data, rebuild SDKs and libraries to collect it, and maintain the computing infrastructure to process it all. We want to let our partners skip these distractions, and help them focus on their core value-add: doing something with your data.

Our mission is to eliminate the unnecessary complexity of integrations and tracking, and make using your customer data dead simple.

Our team is now 27 strong and growing quickly—check out our job openings! We’re psyched to take on these new challenges, and help build a healthy, powerful ecosystem with you and our partners. We’re just getting started. And with that in mind, we’ve dropped the .io. You can find us at Segment.com.

Until next time,

Ian, Ilya, Peter and Calvin