Open supply solution analytics platform PostHog raises $15M

Open supply solution analytics provider PostHog today announced it has secured $15 million in a series B round of funding from Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund and Google’s venture capital arm GV.

The news, which comes much less than a day soon after rival Amplitude hit a $4 billion valuation on a $336 million fundraise, shines additional light on the fast digital transformation that firms across the spectrum are undergoing as a outcome of the worldwide pandemic.

It has been a busy couple of years for PostHog, a remote-initially organization with an official HQ in San Francisco. Founded back in 2019 as a predictive analytics tool for sales teams, the startup pivoted to solution analytics through its tenure at Y Combinator (YC) in early 2020, going on to close a $3 million seed round in April led by YC’s Continuity Fund, which was followed by a $9 million series A round led by GV in December.

Today, PostHog claims customers from a slew of big firms like Staples, SpaceX, and Grafana.

Insights

In a nutshell, PostHog serves firms with information and analytics on how individuals are utilizing their goods, providing insights on any notable trends and user retention, assisting to get rid of bottlenecks and cut down churn. The PostHog platform incorporates tools such as “feature flags,” enabling solution teams to test experimental new features with a subset of customers by toggling them on or off, although sessions replays let them watch a precise app-browsing session to realize how consumers are basically interacting with their solution.

Alongside its funding news, PostHog also unveiled a new no cost self-hosted program that lets firms track their solution engagements on their personal infrastructure for no cost.

It’s worth noting that this is separate to PostHog’s totally open supply solution that is accessible on GitHub beneath a permissive MIT license for any one to deploy as they want. PostHog open supply is developed for for solution teams that are tracking no more than 10,000 customers a month, due to the truth it makes use of a much less scalable database (PostgresSQL), which is not so superior at performing analytical queries on bigger datasets.

PostHog Free, on the other hand, makes use of ClickHouse. This needs a small more spadework to configure properly, but it is developed to scale to 1 million customers per month. And although it is not totally MIT licensed but, PostHog solution marketer Joe Martin told VentureBeat that it plans to make this totally open supply and self-serve “in a few months.”

So this signifies that PostHog will basically have two open supply goods? According to Martin, the program is to merge the technical improvements it has made from PostHog Free into the current open supply solution, hence producing PostHog open supply far more scalable.

“We ultimately want it to be suitable for everyone from individual hobbyists through to developers in enterprises, but there are some technical goals we need to reach first,” Martin explained.

Elsewhere, PostHog provides two plans developed for enterprise-grade firms – the self-hosted PostHog Scale, which is managed by the consumer with assistance from PostHog and the totally-hosted PostHog Cloud, exactly where PostHog requires care of all the things.

Open supply ethos

The way that PostHog has structured its small business is one that has grow to be increasingly commonplace across the technologies spectrum, building a so-known as “open core” small business model on top rated of an open supply solution. By opening its platform to the developer neighborhood, this builds bridges with possible customers and creates a potentially profitable inroad to more paid consumers additional down the road.

“The way we think about this is guided by our mission, which is to increase the number of successful products in the world,” Martin mentioned. “If we can help more users out for free, we invariably get a higher volume of inbound paid enquiries. Often a developer that finds us useful on a side project one weekend may decide to take us into work on Monday.”

With a further $15 million in the bank, the organization is now spooling up to cater to a increasing demand for its solution, with plans to double its headcount by the finish of this year and then once more by the finish of 2022.

“We actually weren’t planning to raise more funds this soon, but we were getting swamped with demand and were literally unable to keep up,” Martin mentioned.

In terms of its personal solution roadmap, the organization mentioned it is preparing to introduce improved assistance for “data ingestion and export to data warehouses,” although it also plans to develop on its lately launched plugins library, which enables developers to tailor PostHog to suit their personal use situations. “PostHog as a platform,” is the basic concept right here.

Originally appeared on: TheSpuzz