Showing that the product analytics industry is alive and well, Kubit today announced that it raised $18 million in a series A funding round led by Insight Partners, bringing its total capital raised to $24 million. Kubit says that it’ll put the fresh cash toward growing its team and expanding its platform, which helps customers to manage their data quality.
CEO Alex Li says that he founded Kubit in 2018 to solve what he believes is one of the biggest pain points of the product analytics space: losing data control and lack of transparency. Previously, Li spent 10 years building mobile apps and used product analytics tools at companies including Smule, Booyah and eBay. These tools fell short of his expectations, he says, in that they often required sending data to third parties and created siloed analytics practices.
“Product analytics has proven its significance in many large enterprises’ successes. [But as] an industry, product analytics is still young and has become more open and transparent,” Li told TechCrunch via email. “No enterprise wants to be locked into a siloed blackbox solution that demands control of a customer’s precious data.”
As a refresher, product analytics is the process of analyzing how users engage with a product — whether an app, website, or subscription service — to allow companies to track and analyze user engagement data. The idea is to use the data to improve and optimize the product, and identify bugs as they crop up in the deployment process.
Kubit’s product analytics dashboard.
Kubit’s platform is designed to work with existing cloud data warehouses (i.e., central repositories of business data) without the need to transform, normalize, or convert product analytics data. In this way, Kubit eliminates the need for batch jobs and the duplication of data, Li argues, potentially reducing cloud computing costs.
“We help our customers to analyze their users’ behavior patterns through their user data. Kubit doesn’t store or process any personally identifiable information and most of the user data is already anonymized,” Li said. “With our integration[s], our customers have full control of their data and can make changes whenever they want, including deletion.”
Li sees Amplitude, June and Mixpanel as direct competitors in the product analytics segment. Mixpanel and Amplitude have formidable warchests. But Li tells TechCrunch that both Kubit’s revenue and headcount (13 people) is projected to triple this year, driven by a growing customer base that includes “several largest enterprises in entertainment, social and education fields.”
“[I]t seems that the consumer segment has recovered very well [from the pandemic] and the surviving enterprises are the winners who really see the needs of product analytics to keep their growth going strong,” Li said. “Moreover, the down time [during the pandemic] gave many data teams the opportunity to reinforce their modern data stack and realize the significance of data control and transparency.”