Hevo Data, a SaaS startup that is helping firms collate troves of data they generate and accumulate to make better use of them, has raised $30 million in a new financing round following a strong year of growth.
Sequoia Capital India led the San Francisco and Bangalore-headquartered startup’s $30 million Series B round. A number of investors, including Qualgro, Lachy Groom and Chiratae Ventures, also participated in the round, which pushes the five-year-old startup’s all-time funding to $43 million.
Firms, with so many divisions such as marketing, engineering and design, engage with numerous services and platforms for their business. But the data they generate and rely on sits in silos within those divisions, making it difficult for the firm as a whole to gain real-time visibility into it and take actionable decisions.
Hevo Data has built a data pipeline platform to make it exceedingly easy for firms to integrate and fetch data from different sources to one dashboard as well as to supply it to popular cloud data-warehouses such as Snowflake, Google BigQuery and Amazon Redshift, explained Manish Jethani, co-founder and chief executive of the startup, in an interview with TechCrunch.
“Different parts of the company use different types of software for their work. But if the data doesn’t flow across different departments, nobody will have full visibility into what all that is happening,” he said, drawing parallels with the flow of blood in a human body.
“So as a business, if I have invested thousands of dollars in marketing, I would want to know how many users came and bought — or not purchase — from the platform and how many times they made the purchase. How much money did I end up making per order? This would help me inform how I should be tweaking my marketing spends,” he said. “For this, I have to combine my marketing, orders data, finance data and customer support data,” he said.
It’s a challenge that Jethani grappled with in his previous startup, called SpoonJoy, which he sold to Grofers. After moving to Grofers, a much bigger startup, Jethani said he realized that even larger firms face this challenge. (He said that companies as large as Amazon and Flipkart tend to build their own workflows and have large workforces to tackle this.)
The startup’s offering combines data from multiple disparate sources and applications, including sales CRM, advertising channels, marketing tech, financial system software and customer support products to build a 360-degree view of their business and customers, said Jethani.
Some popular integrations offered by Hevo.
One of the additional value prepositions of Hevo is that it’s a no-code platform. Individuals are not spending much time — or require any technical understanding in — establishing the integrations to get the data to flow to a central hub, he said. (The accessibility is as simple as setting up an action on IFTTT, for instance.) Hevo features more than 100 pre-built integrations across databases, SaaS applications, cloud storage, SDKs and streaming services.
The startup said it has amassed over 1,000 customers across multiple categories in more than 40 countries and will deploy the fresh funds to develop new products as it moves to tap a bigger slice of the market. The startup said it grew by a whopping 500% in the past year. One of the new offerings it is working on is an insight platform that will enable users to do analysis with the data they are collating.
Another product in the works is called “Reverse ETL,” which will aim to help customers use their data beyond just the analytics use case, he said.
“Data has become one of the most important business inputs in the last decade. Hevo Data is building foundational infrastructure to enable bi-directional mobility of data,” said Tejeshwi Sharma, MD at Sequoia India, in a statement.
“The more mobile data becomes within organizations, the more useful it shall be. We are impressed by the product DNA of the company — the secret behind the widely loved product combines the duality of technical sophistication and consumer grade experience. Sequoia Capital India is delighted to double down on the partnership with Hevo and lead the Series B round.”