Segment (YC S11) Raises $15 Million Series A

https://segment.com/blog/segment-raises-15M-accel-kleiner-perkins/

by pkrein • 12 years ago

141 47 12 years ago

noinput• 12 years ago

Big congrats to Peter, Raphel and the whole team! A solid service and solves a real problem that developers go through every time they start a new project & update their existing ones. Excited to see what you come up with next.

aroch• 12 years ago

I wonder how much of that 15m was spent to buy the .com domain? Interestingly the domain was registered by DomainsByProxy, why is a real company hiding their contact info behind DomainsByProxy?

That being said, I've used them for a little over a year and a half now and am quite pleased. The "one stop shop" for integrating all the analytics and email stuff is great

pkrein3• 12 years ago

a very very small fraction :)

mmahemoff• 12 years ago

Usually proxied domains are offered free for the first year and the checkbox tends to be turned on by default. I doubt they gave it much thought.

jph• 12 years ago

Segment is great -- the team helped me with a complex mobile app issue, and Peter personally came to my office, opened up code, and helped solve it. Segment is providing stellar developer support and service to me and my client. Congratulations!

jusben1369• 12 years ago

Excellent news! We've used them at Spreedly for a long time now (a lot of similarities in some ways) The biggest benefit for us is it helped us run MixPanel and KissMetrics side by side for an extended period of time before finally deciding. I think too there is an enterprise API that will be exposed allowing us to send the raw data to some custom tools?

fwr• 12 years ago

.com domains are getting expensive!

iaw• 12 years ago

Is it just me, or has down voting become more of a thing lately?

kuni-toko-tachi• 12 years ago

Segment is a great service. One of the first things I setup on a new site.

rmac• 12 years ago

Why drop the .io and spend cash on the .com?I'd guess it was somewhere in the 10k-60k range...

Does the tld really matter? My hunch is that .io is perceived as a toy product TLD and .com is where 'real' business is done?

This kind of sentiment sucks though because other startups probably see it as well and will needlessly shell out cash for a .com.

ryanSrich2• 12 years ago

Outside of the tech field everything but a .com is viewed negatively.

When I worked for clients they used to really push hard for a .com. They'd rather have a 25 character .com than use anything else. My guess is that they only trust .com.

MisterBastahrd• 12 years ago

Well, dot net has a historical connotation to being used by companies that shared a name with a larger, more reputable company and dot org is for charities. Dot com is simply what people are most likely to remember. This doesn't matter so much if all you're doing is running a mobile app, but when you've got a site to worry about, the domain extension matters.

cldellow• 12 years ago

Photographers are also open to alternative domains. Our company had to change its name early in its existence. When we were explaining it to some photographers we work with, they were surprised that we didn't go with .co or .photography (shudder).

.com is simple and guaranteed to work. By that I mean both with humans (who just assume '.com' is the thing that goes in the location bar) and with computers (Interac e-transfers, a way of moving money in Canada by sending to an email address, don't work with .photography domains).

crucialfelix3• 12 years ago

also .io will seem pretty dated in a few years.

its okay for conferences and dev related things, but I wouldn't start a business on it now.

pkrein3• 12 years ago

your hunch is correct. as engineers we're attached to .io ourselves, but outside the developer community .io invites confusion -- as we grow, .com is simpler.

we spent 10.5k :)

toddynho• 12 years ago

That is a fabulous deal. Whomever handled that negotiation/purchase deserves some donuts.

wclax04• 12 years ago

Thanks for sharing the cost.

rbinv• 12 years ago

That's actually a pretty good price.

davmar• 12 years ago

wow wow great price.

markolschesky• 12 years ago

Someone recently asked me what country our company that had an .io domain was located in. Explaining that it was shorthand for input/output and that it was a tech thing was lost on them.

brandnewlow• 12 years ago

Congrats guys!

mblevin• 12 years ago

Congrats guys. As a Segment partner, we love that people can "take the Pepsi challenge" in terms of other analytics platforms. Helps prevent lock in and forces companies to continue to push value and differentiation vs relying on "ugh I guess we'll keep XYZ because ripping out the integration is such a pain"

andreash2• 12 years ago

Congrats Peter! I've been using segment.io with many projects and clients since 2012, and I'm superhappy. Peter also helped me alot. My only concerns are:

1. That they will continue to raise prices like many other in the SaaS-space, without grandfathering excisting user/customers.

2. That they will keep limiting certain integrations to their premium plans. This prevents me from integrating with them for new "pet"-projects. I make a lot of MVP-type product for clients, that we test the demand for. For such products, I usually integrate with a lot of tools straight away (GA, Mixpanel, Facebook Ads, Adwords, Optimizely). Even though such MVP-project only will get a few hundre visitors, it still requires Segment.io's "Startup"-plan, which is 79usd/month. I think it makes a lot more sense to allow most integrations for the free plan, and rather segment your customer based on API calls. Many of the integrations that require the Startup-plans are really useful for MVP project (Facebook Ads, Adwords, Kissmetrics, Mailchimp etc.). So please segment your customers based on API-calls, not integrations (maybe except for super expensive enterprise software). I know I could just have one "Startup"-account, and add all the MVP projects to that account, but some of my clients want to have their own segment.io account.

pkrein3• 12 years ago

Thanks Andreas!

1. Yep we've grandfathered all the old customers as we've updated pricing, they keep their old pricing.

2. We're thinking about ways to handle this, and may have some updates soon. There's actually a low API call threshold (5k api calls I believe) where we just won't bother you about payment no matter what integrations you're using.

andreash2• 12 years ago

1. Nice, I think we all agree it's the best solution to give something back to the early-adoptors.

2. Good. There are just so many useful tools for a MVP-projects in your Startup-plan (and some in the Project-plan). You should move most, if not all of them to the Developer-plan. I just think it makes really sense for you to go for the Mixpanel and Stripe-approach of getting as many web products tighly integrated with you at the earliest time possible (at the MVP-stage).

Maybe it makes sense to limit integration in the short term (forces some people to go premium), but I think it'll be better for you in the long term to lower the bar of integrating with you. My experience is that once integrated with you, there is no turning back:)

beachstartup3• 12 years ago

uh, i disagree. strongly.

if you are incorporating their product into commercial projects of your own, how in the world do you come to the conclusion that it should be free?

to segment: raise your prices according to the utility your product provides. make money. this kind of product is changing the way enterprise software is built and sold and viewed at large. i will gladly pay good money to a dozen small saas startups rather than oracle or microsoft or whoever. i've worked for the giants and it's a complete shit show. i know where that money goes and it's not pretty.

i LIKE paying for saas because it feels like i am engaging in an actual business transaction. i trust 'free' (as in gratis) solutions as far as i can throw them.

also, companies that under-charge are toxic elements in the marketplace - they push out healthy firms because they can subsidize the cost of operations and marketing with an unlimited budget of funny money. and when that solution your business is relying on goes out of business because they never had the inclination to make any money, that sucks.

try going to the market and asking about their freemium chicken.

look_at_me_• 12 years ago

No need to ask, your local super market or big box store probably already has a freemium model -- samples (http://imgs.sfgate.com/blogs/images/sfgate/parenting/2010/08...)

I do, however, whole hardheartedly agree with you sentiment about relying upon free services or saas.

Croaky• 12 years ago

Awesome! I'm a huge fan of Segment: http://playbook.thoughtbot.com/#instrumentation

We're using this code-level approach in basically every one of our Rails apps these days: http://robots.thoughtbot.com/segment-io-and-ruby

Most common integrations: Intercom, Mixpanel, HubSpot, AdWords, Twitter Ads, Google Analytics.

Good interview with Peter (Segment founder) from February this year: http://podcasts.thoughtbot.com/giantrobots/86

arrowgunz• 12 years ago

This is an amazing news. Congrats, Peter and the rest of the Segment Team. Also, kudos on the Open Source work.

mehuln• 12 years ago

Congrats Guys! Doing it right is more important than doing it fast. Awesome!!

paladin8• 12 years ago

Huge! It's always been a pleasure to work with Segment, and they've made our lives at Amplitude a lot easier. Glad to see that their hard work is being valued :)

Congrats to the team!

jarredcolli2• 12 years ago

Way to go Peter!

jarredcolli2• 12 years ago

congrats Peter!

mathattack• 12 years ago

Congrats! That this comes 3 years post-cycle shows good tenacity on the part of the team.

sskates• 12 years ago

Congrats guys! We at Amplitude are very lucky you guys exist.

For quite a while, a majority of our new inbounds mentioned that they first saw Amplitude through the list of tools at Segment. A lot of companies see Segment as a recommendation platform- so they’ll go to them to get a list of vendors. It's definitely huge for us that you guys are around.

mkatz0630• 12 years ago

Congrats guys! Brings continued and much needed attention to help app developers more easily operationalize their data and connect with partners.

The ecosystem of developer tools is expanding fast and guys like Segment (and us- mParticle) are helping lead the way for app developers to move faster and build better apps.

This is good for everyone!!!

sudonim• 12 years ago

Congratulations Segment team! As I've said to multiple folks, working with Customer.io through Segment removes "Integration risk"... the risk of spending a bunch of time integrating and then hating the service.

I'm thrilled for your progress and excited for what your team does in the future!

ishofwest• 12 years ago

How is this service better than 100s of marketing companies out there ? All you do is track people without their consent , steal data in un-ethical manner. Anyone can raise millions these days. What a time !

shaunrussell• 12 years ago

Congrats! We at CapLinked love your product.

brentm• 12 years ago

Congrats - this is a great service.

fourstar• 12 years ago

Congrats. How has it been with TJ Holowaychuk on the team?

Segment (YC S11) Raises $15 Million Series A

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