Segment Raises $64 Million to Set the Standard for Customer Data Infrastructure

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - July 13, 2017) - Segment, the customer data platform, today announced it raised $64 million in Series C funding led by the Y Combinator Continuity Fund and GV. Y Combinator Partner and former Twitter COO Ali Rowghani will join Segment's Board of Directors. Existing investors Accel, Thrive Capital, Ron Conway's SV Angel, and NEA also participated in this round, bringing total funding to $109 million. Segment will use the new funds to further invest in product development and the expansion of its team. This will help Segment meet the growing demand for its technology, particularly in the enterprise, and become the standard infrastructure for customer data across all businesses.

"Y Combinator has been a Segment partner since the beginning, and we see very few companies with this special combination of strong internal culture, customer momentum, and market opportunity," said Ali Rowghani, CEO of Y Combinator Continuity. "Segment is battle-tested, providing customer data infrastructure to some of the world's biggest brands. They are on a path to be among the most successful Y Combinator companies."

As consumers continue to interact with businesses in new ways and on new devices, businesses are racing to effectively capture and use data about these interactions to deliver better experiences. Making sense of that data and getting it organized, whether to improve product design or to send personalized messages based on past customer interactions, is a difficult technical challenge.

Segment provides a suite of products for customer data management that collects, unifies, and sends data to over 200 analytics and marketing tools automatically. Businesses can also use Segment to combine their website and mobile data with data from additional customer touch points in cloud services like Stripe, Salesforce, Mailchimp and Zendesk, creating a complete picture of their customers. Segment does this all in a way that respects consumer privacy, by focusing on first-party data and eliminating the need for third-party data aggregators when analyzing user behavior across multiple domains.

With this round of funding, Segment will develop new products that make the data flowing through its platform more valuable by consolidating it in a meaningful way. Currently, the data that companies collect is multiplying at a rapid pace, making it difficult to understand and put to use. Segment plans to unify those disparate data points to provide a clear sense of each customer and share hints about their needs. This synthesis on top of the streaming data will make building personalized products and marketing accessible to every digital business.

"Segment sits at the center of the marketing-tech ecosystem, and this investment will help accelerate our core platform development as we centralize the data flowing through our platform and expose it in new structured ways," said Segment CEO Peter Reinhardt. "We're just at the beginning of the enormous opportunity to help businesses all over the world use their customer data effectively to build better products and experiences."

Segment's open source software, analytics.js, is used by over 300,000 websites to power customer data and event tracking. More than 15,000 customers rely on Segment's technology, which processes 80 billion data points a month. Companies such as Intuit, Atlassian, and Gap use Segment's infrastructure to help make sense of their customer data and provide integrated, personalized experiences to their customers. Segment's mobile libraries power data collection on over 6,000 apps, including Instacart, HotelTonight, and DraftKings. Segment now employs 160 people in San Francisco, New York, and Vancouver.

About Segment
Segment is the infrastructure for customer data. Businesses use Segment's API to unlock 200+ tools for every team across their organization. With Segment, developers can stop building tedious and expensive one-off data integrations, turning on their favorite apps right from the Segment dashboard. From implementing advertising to marketing automation to data warehousing and beyond -- getting customer data into business critical systems isn't an engineering roadblock anymore. Segment is trusted by thousands of companies including Crate&Barrel, Gap, The Knot, and New Relic. To learn more, visit https://segment.com.