Looking to ease engineers from customer data tasks, Freshpaint raises $14.5 million

Customer data acquisition and analytics are essential aspects of every organization’s data pipeline, allowing marketers to sell more effectively. With richer and readily available data, organizations can understand their target audience better, nurture leads more effectively and close deals at the right time.

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But due to complex processes, difficulties in accurate data collection and growing data regulations, many organizations rely heavily on engineering teams and third-party data providers. Data infrastructure platform Freshpaint aims to ease this reliance by enabling businesses to easily capture and activate customer data across hundreds of integrations through its new data analytics platform. 

How Freshpaint works 

Founded in 2019 by web analytics veterans Michael Malis and Steven Fitzsimmons, Freshpaint provides nonengineering teams with tools to automate analytics tracking and generate a behavioral customer dataset, then activate their customer data to hundreds of out-of-the-box integrations to analytics and marketings tools like Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Iterable, Braze, BigQuery, Snowflake and more. Unlike traditional platforms used to collect and activate customer data that require lots of developer resources. 

Since launching in 2020, Freshpaint has partnered with customers like Breville, Monster.com and Thumbtack, as well as B2B companies like Bitrise, Modern Health and others.

“Companies rely too heavily on their most expensive employees — the engineers — to get customer behavioral data (often called customer events) to the tools they use to analyze and engage customers,” Fitzsimmons told Venturebeat. “This costs companies up to 50% more to have a developer do this versus an analyst or a growth person. The product, growth and data teams that need this customer data quickly end up waiting a month or more to get it, negatively impacting speed.”

Instead of waiting a month with the engineering-intensive process, users can set up the customer data they need directly in Freshpaint without writing code, according to the company. In addition, the data platform gives business users one-click integrations that backfill up to a year of historical data, which allows them to send a recently configured customer event to more than 100 SaaS tools and advertising platforms.

Freshpaint is also launching a free tier of their software to ensure even startups can have easy access to customer data and, in turn, achieve their business goals quicker.

The free plan comes with several features, including the following, according to the company: 

• Automatically instrumenting analytics tracking on a site or app in minutes without engineering work, saving teams weeks by eliminating up to 90% of manual coding work.
• Enabling product managers, data teams and other nonengineers to tag events with Freshpaint’s Visual Tagger.
• Pioneering the hybrid tracking methodology where Autotrack and Precision Tracking are combined, enabling companies to scale their customer data infrastructure as they grow.
• Releasing hundreds of one-click integrations that install and send customer data to the analytics and marketing tools that data teams, product managers and marketers use to analyze and engage customers.

Solving data acquisition challenges

Fitzsimmons says that one of the reasons companies choose Freshpaint is because it helps them reduce their security footprint. 

“Freshpaint is GDPR, SOC 2 and HIPAA-compliant, and we’ve built specific functionality to manage sensitive data across your stack of SaaS tools,” said Fitzsimmons. “The steps regulators and companies are taking to increase privacy have made relying on third-party data to make decisions less dependable. That’s why first-party data has become even more valuable in guiding a company’s growth.”

Freshpaint captures the first-party data on a company’s product and website, so that product, marketing and data leaders can use it to create an even more individualized experience for every customer.

Future Freshpaint focus

“Our ultimate goal is to help companies get customer data from any tool into any destination without relying heavily on engineering. That means investing heavily in our free plan and continuing to build the functionality around the data warehouse for our customers further along the data maturity curve. We’re going to be doubling our team size to about 40 over the next year to support that product development,” said Fitzsimmons.

Today, the company reported $14.5 million in financing, with a $9.5 million series A led by Intel Capital and an additional $5 million in debt. In addition, Nick Washburn, senior managing director at Intel Capital, will help accelerate Freshpaint’s growth by joining its board of directors.

Originally appeared on: TheSpuzz