There are lots of analytics services out there, but what if they don’t give you the exact information that you’re looking for? Well, you could build your own system from the ground up — or you could use Keen IO, a startup that recently raised $2.35 million in new funding.
The company describes itself as “the API for custom analytics.” Basically, it offers tools via an API that developers can use to build their own analytics products. Keen IO can supposedly help customers gather data from any source, store it, and visualize it in any way that they want.
Co-founder and CEO Kyle Wild said he’s not trying to compete with products like Google Analytics. (In fact, Wild said his first job out of college was as a “developer success” consultant with Google Analytics.)
“You can’t rely on out-of-the-box parts for everything,” Wild said. “One of my favorite examples is a smartwatch. No one’s ever going to make an out-of-the-box smartwatch analytics product. It’s just too fragmented.”
He added that some Keen IO customers sign-up when they’re thinking about building their own analytics system and they realize it’s “faster to build it on us, and more future proof and robust and cheaper, at least in the beginning.” Others, meanwhile, have already built their own system: “They come to us when it starts to break.”
To illustrate what Keen IO can do, Wild said that building a system for tracking conversion funnels is difficult (“funnels are hard”), but using the API, a developer could create a funnel with some simple code. (You can see code samples of Keen IO implementation on the company’s front page.) It says customers can also upload historical data, access new data in real-time, and white label the service for their own customers.
Wild also emphasized that Keen IO can scale to large amounts of data, and that the company aims to be transparent about the different technology it uses — “a lot of the meat,” he said, comes from Storm, an open source system for real-time computation.
Keen IO launched a beta version last year, and it started charging customers in April. The company is already “approaching profitability pretty rapidly,” Wild said.
The funding, which Wild described as an additional seed round (Keen.io previously raised $750,000 in seed funding), was led by Amplify Partners and Rincon Venture Partners. Pelion Venture Partners also invested, as did previous backers 500 Startups, XG Ventures, Jason Seats, and Loren Siebert.
“Keen IO has all of the attributes we look for in a company: a passionate, expert founding team; a sound scalable business model; big market tailwinds; and a compelling customer value proposition,” said Rincon’s Jim Andelman in an emailed statement. “As a testament to market receptivity, we introduced the company during our evaluation to four prospective customers in SaaS and Ad-tech, and every single one of them plans to use the service.”