The notion of centralizing all of an organization’s data in a single repository to improve access for users was shot down almost as soon as it entered the discussion due to the impossible logistics of the undertaking. But there do exist some narrower use cases where the benefits of the model exceed the hassle, which Segment Inc. hopes to enable with the help of a $27 million investment announced this morning.

The capital will fund the development of more features for its namesake service, which began its life as an open-source library to automate the extraction of information from a handful of popular enterprise systems and has since evolved into a full-blown customer data aggregation platform. It draws its appeal from the face many line-of-business activities rely on the same user information.

The audience statistics that a retailer’s sales department leverages to tailor offers according to the interests of shoppers, for instance, are part of the dataset that the marketing team employs to segment visitors who frequent its site. And support representatives can also use certain subsets of that information to identify the best ways to interact with different types of customers.

The problem is that each team relies on separate services that are rarely synchronized, which requires bringing in the IT department to create custom connectors at the cost of time and effort better spent elsewhere. Pooling customer data in a single platform allows Segment to do away with that hassle and spare users of having to manually shuffling their records about while waiting on support to be added for their specific app.

Data is uploaded to its platform through a unified programming interface and sent back out to the relevant services via over 100 pre-implemented integrations spanning nearly two dozen use cases. The capital from the new round, which saw the participation of Thrive Capital and three existing backers including former The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc president Jon Winkelried, will help increase that number considerably.

Segment will focus on increasing not only the amount of data sources supported in its platform but also the variety of the information itself, which reflects the growing demand among organizations to learn more about their leads in order to better identify conversion opportunities. The startup expects to double its headcount to 100 employees as part of that effort.

Image via Segment