Marketing data startup Segment raises $64M

Segment has raised $64 million in Series C funding, with the Y Combinator Continuity Fund and GV leading the round.

The continuity fund is the $700 million fund led by former Twitter COO Ali Rowghani. It selectively writes checks for YC startups as they raise bigger rounds.

As part of the deal, Rowghani will be joining Segment’s board of directors. In the funding announcement, he said the startup is “on a path to be among the most successful Y Combinator companies.”

Three of Segment’s founders, including CEO Peter Reinhardt, dropped out of MIT to participate in YC’s summer 2011 program. The company’s products allow businesses to send their online data to different analytics and marketing tools, and to combine that data with customer information from services like Stripe, Salesforce, Mailchimp and Zendesk.

Reinhardt argued that the need for this kind of data infrastructure is only growing.

“For the last five years, a lot of investors have been saying that at some point, this industry needs to consolidate — you can’t have more and more email marketing tools,” he said. But instead, “Companies are piecing together these best-in-class tools rather than these broad suites … People like more and more specialized, niche tools for companies of their size or their geography or their industry.”

And as companies employ a broader arsenal of marketing and analytics products, Reinhardt wants Segment to serve as their “central customer data platform.”

The product is already used by more than 15,000 customers, including Intuit, Atlassian and Gap. Reinhardt said that while Segment was initially adopted by startups, there’s a big opportunity in selling the technology to large enterprises.

He’s also hoping to see Segment turn into a broader platform, where third parties can build products that tap into its data — he said there are already more than 200 tools built on top of Segment, with 30 percent of them created by partners, rather than Segment itself.

The new round brings Segment’s total funding to $109 million. Previous investors Accel, Thrive Capital, SV Angel, and NEA also participated.