Our $27 Million Series B
Today we’re announcing our $27M Series B! The round was co-led by NEA and Menlo Ventures, with participation from Initialized Capital and Pear VC. They’re all existing investors in Heap, and we’re excited to work even more closely with them as we grow.
We don’t celebrate fundraises internally at Heap. Instead, we try to make sure we celebrate the right achievements: new products and happy customers. Money is just a means to that end.
So how do we plan to turn this money into happy customers? Two ways:
Automate Away the Annoying Parts of Analytics
Data is a massive lever for making people smarter. Unfortunately, getting value out of data often looks more like tedious labor than data science.
If a new question comes up — for example “how does this new feature we’ve shipped affect long-term retention?” — you’ll often have to:
Lament not having data to answer your question already.
Bother an engineer to write tracking code for you.
Wait for code to get written.
Wait for that code to get pushed live.
Wait a few weeks for data to trickle in.
Bother the data team to run an analysis for you.
Pray that no mistakes happened along the way.
This clearly isn’t the future.
In 2013, we built Heap with a new philosophy in mind: automatically capture all user data. This saves our customers from the pain of manually defining events, writing brittle tracking code, and waiting to collect data.
It won’t end there, though. There’s still more friction that we want to automate away for our customers. We won’t be satisfied until analytics is reduced to just:
Connect data sources.
See actionable insights.
Stay tuned for exciting news on that front soon. Going forward, we also need to…
Grow the Heap Team
The success of our customers (and thus Heap’s success) depends on hiring exceptional Heaple.
At Heap, we try to find ways to give our existing team more leverage before we increase headcount. It’s easy to overestimate the efficiency of large teams and underestimate the power of autonomy, automation, and individual vision. As such, we’ve always focused on hiring self-directed people who can take enormous problem spaces and converge on the parts that matter most.
This means our team is unusually lean given our stage. We’ll need to fill out these gaps as we grow:
We have no VPs.
We have no product managers.
We have no designers.
We have one marketer we hired just this year.
We have two support people helping give 6,000+ monthly active customers an amazing experience.
We have two engineers building out a product that makes analytics accessible to everyone.
We have five engineers building out our core infrastructure and pushing the frontier of large-scale computation.
We have two engineers devoted entirely to business ops. Their mandate is to build products that make our internal sales, marketing, and customer success teams as efficient as possible (using Heap, of course!).
If any of these problems sound interesting to you, talk to us — we’re hiring!
No matter how much we grow, we’ll always continue to focus on what matters most: making data useful for everyone. We’re incredibly thankful to our 6,000+ customers who’ve allowed Heap to power their businesses. The future of Heap will have an even bigger impact on how you work, and we can’t wait to build it out for you!