Custom Analytics Startup Keen IO Raises $11.3M Round From Sequoia And Others

Keen IO, a startup that helps developers build their analytics products, is announcing that it has raised $11.3 million in Series A funding.

Keen IO co-founder and CEO Kyle Wild told me that when the company first considered raising a new round, the previous backers offered to fund it on their own. However, since Sequoia capital’s Aaref Hilaly had reached out earlier, Wild said he checked in to see if the firm wanted to participate as well â€" under the condition that there was a signed term sheet within two weeks.

“A lot of firms said they couldn’t do it, but for the next two weeks, on every business day, we were engaged with Sequoia,” Wild said.

So Sequoia Capital ended up leading the round, with Hilaly joining Keen IO’s board of directors. Existing investors Pelion, Amplify, and Rincon, Cloud Power Capital, and Morris Wheeler also participated in the new funding.

When I’ve spoken to Wild in the past, he’s said the Keen IO platform is aimed at businesses who can’t get the specific data they want from existing analytics tools, but also don’t want to or can’t build their own. It allows customers to gather data from any source, store it, and visualize it in any way they want.

Wild said yesterday that the fastest-growing part of the company’s customer base comes from the “Internet of things”, i.e., Internet-connected gadgets, while the biggest revenue source has been ad tech. Ultimately, Wild said he hopes to see Keen IO used in very broadly â€" while there have been some criticisms in the vein of, “Oh man, your customers have to code?” he said the team has a different perspective: “We look at it, as our customers get to write code, so they don’t have to solve the problem our way.”

In a blog post about the funding, Wild said Keen IO has seen 300 percent growth in data volume this year, and that the number grew 50 percent month over month in April.

Wild added that the new funding will go toward marketing, and towards continued product development, including more work on open source projects that can “demonstrate what can be done” with the Keen IO platform.