UPDATED 13:12 EST / JULY 13 2017

BIG DATA

Segment raises $64M to free brands’ customer data

The numerous channels through which companies engage customers nowadays provide a tremendous amount of information about their buying preferences. But marketing personnel often struggle to take full advantage of the data since it’s typically spread out between disparate systems, a problem that Segment Inc. has set out to solve.

The startup’s efforts are supported by $64 million in newly raised funding from a consortium led by the Y Combinator Continuity Fund and Alphabet Inc.’s GV. Several of the contributors to Segment’s previous rounds, including Accel, took the opportunity to invest as well. The cash infusion comes not long after the number of companies using its namesake cloud service passed 15,000. 

Segment’s platforms lets firms collect user data from a variety of mediums and send them to their data-crunching system of choice for centralized analysis. An online retailer, for example, could check how the click-through rate of a mobile advertising campaign shapes up against earlier promotions that targeted PC users. The data can also be correlated with sales records in such scenarios to measure the revenue impact. 

Segment claims its platform has equally powerful uses outside the marketing department. Companies can among other purposes use activity data collected from their customer-facing services to improve support operations, for example by creating a knowledge base to address frequently recurring issues.

Today’s round could help Segment further extend its capabilities. Peter Reinhardt, the startup’s chief executive, wrote in a blog post that several product launches are planned for later this year. The official funding announcement meanwhile suggested that the development effort will place a particular focus on large enterprises, which account for a growing part of the Segment user base. Among the big names using its platform are Thomson Reuters Corp., Gap Inc. and accounting software giant Intuit Inc.

Segment has raised $109 million in funding to date.

Image: Segment

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