- Open source product analytics company PostHog announced it has raised $12 million in funding. These are the details.
Open source product analytics company PostHog announced it has raised $12 million in funding. And the company revealed several new features including plugins, session recordings and feature flags.
The Series A funding round was led by GV (also known as Google Ventures) with participation from Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund. And PostHog also brings on board Jason Warner (CTO, GitHub) as an investor, joining Solomon Hykes (Founder, Docker) and David Cramer (Founder, Sentry).
Since February 2020, there were 3,000 deployments of PostHog’s software, ranging from startups to some of the world’s largest institutions. Originally, PostHog was conceived during Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 batch where co-founders James Hawkins (CEO) and Tim Glaser (CTO) were working on a different product at the time, but they were frustrated at having to send user data to third parties to understand which features of their software were being used.
Upon learning how enterprises self-build a data pipeline, data lake, and analytics stack, the pair quickly realized they could build something much easier to use for large teams of developers or product managers that would help anyone answer simple product questions without writing any code or sending any data to a third party.
Now PostHog enables software teams to understand user behavior – auto-capturing events, performing product analytics and dashboarding, enabling video replays, and rolling out new features behind feature flags — all based on its single open source platform.
PostHog had raised an initial $3 million seed round in March 2020 as COVID-19 caused many parts of the U.S. to go into lockdown. Then the company closed a $9 million Series A round from GV and Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund in July. The latest round led by GV has enabled PostHog to further build the team, expand the breadth of use cases, and to launch a scalable enterprise version.
PostHog plans to use the funding to continue building out its product and engineering teams, accelerate the delivery of new platform features, and enhance its PostHog Enterprise offering.
KEY QUOTES:
James Hawkins, co-founder and CEO, said: “Our goal is to increase the number of successful products in the world. That starts with empowering engineers to improve a business’ metrics and consolidating the disparate set of tools out there today to understand user behavior. We also now offer PostHog Enterprise, which is a more scalable version of our platform, designed to support tens of thousands to tens of millions of users.”
“We’ve been designed to be all-remote and open source from scratch. Anyone in the world can view all our policies or even suggest changes to them. Having public discussions and policies written down avoids the need for most meetings, so we can work across multiple time zones, and lets us easily onboard our team much more rapidly than a traditional organization.”
— James Hawkins, PostHog co-founder and CEO
“PostHog’s approach to open source product analytics for developers addresses a large market opportunity in product analytics. PostHog has seen strong early traction from the developer community, and we continue to be impressed with the execution and vision of the co-founding team.”
— Tyson Clark, General Partner at GV
