- A San Francisco-based customer data company that emerged from Y Combinator.
- It Raises $64 million in a funding round led by the accelerator’s growth fund.
- Ali Rowghani, the former chief operating officer of Twitter is joining the board at the segment.
- The latest infusion of money, led by Y Combinator Continuity Fund and GV, brings Segment’s total funding to $109 million.
Y Combinator (YC) is an American seed money startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It includes Stripe, Airbnb, Cruise Automation, DoorDash, Coinbase, Instacart, Dropbox, Twitch, and Reddit. The combined valuation of the top YC companies was over US$300 billion as of January 2021. Y Combinator interviews and selects two or more batches of companies per year. The companies receive seed money, advice, and connections in exchange for 7% equity of the company. The program includes “office hours”, where startup founders meet individually and in group meetings. Founders also participate in weekly dinners where guests from the Silicon Valley ecosystem (successful entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, etc.) speak to the founders.
Y Combinator’s motto is “Make Something People Want.” The program teaches founders to market their product, team, and market, refining their business model, achieving product/market fit, and scaling the startup into a high-growth business, etc. The program ends with Demo Day, where startups present their business and sometimes technology to potential investors.
Y Combinator raises $64 Million
A San Francisco-based customer data company that emerged from Y Combinator in the summer of 2011 landed $64 million in a funding round led by the accelerator’s growth fund on Thursday. Ali Rowghani, the former chief operating officer of Twitter who runs YC’s Continuity Fund, is joining the board at Segment. The latest infusion of money, led by Y Combinator Continuity Fund and GV, brings Segment’s total funding to $109 million. Thrive Capital, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, and New Enterprise Associates also participated in the round. The company declined to disclose its newest valuation or revenue metrics. The new funding will help Segment grow from 160 employees to around 320 in the next 18 months.
Y Combinator has been a Segment partner
“Y Combinator has been a Segment partner since the beginning, and we see very few companies with this special combination of strong internal culture, customer momentum, and market opportunity,” Rowghani said in a statement. “Segment is battle-tested, providing customer data infrastructure to some of the world’s biggest brands. They are on a path to be among the most successful Y Combinator companies.”
Segment plans to use the new funds to double its team and expand into serving more enterprise companies. Segment’s technology collects customer data from websites and mobile and cloud apps and puts it into a hub where it can be integrated into other tools for analytics, marketing, and more. The company already has 4,000 paying customers and 11,000 companies using its free plan, it said.
