Heap raises $27M to ‘make data useful for everyone’

Heap, a startup that promises a uniquely comprehensive approach to analytics, has raised $27 million in Series B funding.

Co-founder and CEO Matin Movassate told me Heap’s vision is to “make data useful for everyone.” Normally, according to Movassate (who previously worked as a product manager at Facebook), anyone who wants to ask an analytics-related question has to talk to an engineer about adding the right tracking code, then wait for the data to come in, then talk to an analyst to run queries on that data.

Heap, on the other hand, is supposed to automatically record all user activity on a website or app, and to make it accessible on a self-serve basis. Movassate said it’s also working to integrate other data sources and become “the source of truth for your customer data.”

For example, by connecting data from your website and a payment system like Stripe, Heap can help companies understand what kinds of features are actually driving users to pay for subscriptions. Heap says it has more than 5,000 customers, including Zendesk, Lending Club and CrunchBase.

The new funding was led by previous investors Menlo Ventures and NEA, with participation from Initialized Capital and Pear VC. Heap was previously incubated at Y Combinator and has now raised a total of $40 million.

Looking ahead, Movassate said his goals include more hiring and more product development, allowing Heap to “support more data types and larger volumes of data, so that our customers can focus on getting insights, not on all the plumbing and janitorial work of analytics.”

He also said that by continuing to invest in the product, Heap can stay ahead of “the incumbents” (Mixpanel, Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics).

“We have a really different philosophy, which has implications across our entire stack,” he added. “But at the end of the day, we never want to be complacent with our product.”