Startups

Seven years after last venture investment, Mixpanel scores $200M Series C

Comment

Mixpanel office
Image Credits: Mixpanel

Mixpanel was a hot startup in 2014 when it nabbed a $65 million Series B on an $865 million valuation, a sizable B round and valuation for those days. Today, seven years after that announcement, the company finally has a C round, a $200 million investment on a $1.05 billion valuation from Bain Capital Tech Opportunities.

The company has gone on record with TechCrunch that there are lots of reasons for the gap, and when it promoted COO Amir Movafaghi to CEO in 2018, it was the first in a series of steps that it took to right the ship.

The company later decided to shut down adjacent messaging and A/B testing products to focus solely on the product analytics market. As it made these moves, it also began work to improve slipping customer satisfaction metrics like its net promoter score (NPS), which was sitting at 15 when Movafaghi was promoted, according to the company.

As the focus shifted back to the core product, Mixpanel’s customer retention numbers, NPS and other related metrics have come back — NPS is up to 85 this year — and revenue improved alongside those metrics this year.

“The business performance has continued to accelerate, and all of the [reasons] that we gave to you last time [we spoke] around company metrics, the acceleration on the monetization side, all of those things have just continued to improve and get better,” Movafaghi told me.

When he took over in 2018, he was leading a company with the bones of a successful startup with $100 million in revenue and close to a $1 billion valuation. Now that it has surpassed unicorn status, he doesn’t shy away from the fact that there were ups and downs in the company’s 12-year history.

“Our story, as you know, was not a straight line. Instead, there were definitely [points] at which we had to take inventory and ultimately put the company back on track.” He believes that perhaps they were a bit too early for the market, but as digital transformation accelerated during the pandemic, companies of all types increasingly needed the kind of product data analytics Mixpanel provides. Now, the company can take advantage of that with the new investment.

Dewey Awad, managing director at Bain Capital Tech Opportunities, said that he was impressed with how Movafaghi dealt with the challenges of taking over a company in transition.

“Amir spent a lot of time thinking about the category, how the product fit in, what the [market] was that the company was successful in, and he doubled down on the product and the product-led sales motion, which required a lot more time, was much more complicated and required a lot more hiring,” he said.

But beyond Movafaghi’s leadership, he ultimately likes the focus of the company and believes that product analytics is still a young market with lots of growth potential. He said Bain believed that Movafaghi’s focus on the core product analytics market, and the decision to ax messaging and A/B testing, was absolutely the right way to go.

Mixpanel now has the capital to invest in moving the market share needle through partnerships and other methods, while continuing to invest in its core product for its target enterprise customers.

The company was founded in 2009 by Suhail Doshi and Tim Trefren and has raised $277 million with today’s round, according to Crunchbase data. Doshi was CEO from inception until 2018 when he moved to become chairman of the board.

How Mixpanel got its startup groove back by focusing on its core product

More TechCrunch

When putting a video portal in a public park in the middle of New York City, some inappropriate behavior will likely occur. The Portal, the vision of Lithuanian artist and…

NYC-Dublin real time video portal reopens with some fixes to prevent inappropriate behavior

Longtime New York-based seed investor, Contour Venture Partners, is making progress on its latest flagship fund after lowering its target. The firm closed on $42 million, raised from 64 backers,…

Contour Venture Partners, an early investor in Datadog and Movable Ink, lowers the target for its fifth fund

Meta’s Oversight Board has now extended its scope to include the company’s newest platform, Instagram Threads, and has begun hearing cases from Threads.

Meta’s Oversight Board takes its first Threads case

The company says it’s refocusing and prioritizing fewer initiatives that will have the biggest impact on customers and add value to the business.

SeekOut, a recruiting startup last valued at $1.2 billion, lays off 30% of its workforce

The U.K.’s self-proclaimed “world-leading” regulations for self-driving cars are now official, after the Automated Vehicles (AV) Act received royal assent — the final rubber stamp any legislation must go through…

UK’s autonomous vehicle legislation becomes law, paving the way for first driverless cars by 2026

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text-generating AI chatbot, has taken the world by storm. What started as a tool to hyper-charge productivity through writing essays and code with short text prompts has evolved…

ChatGPT: Everything you need to know about the AI-powered chatbot

SoLo Funds CEO Travis Holoway: “Regulators seem driven by press releases when they should be motivated by true consumer protection and empowering equitable solutions.”

Fintech lender SoLo Funds is being sued again by the government over its lending practices

Hard tech startups generate a lot of buzz, but there’s a growing cohort of companies building digital tools squarely focused on making hard tech development faster, more efficient and —…

Rollup wants to be the hardware engineer’s workhorse

TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 is not just about groundbreaking innovations, insightful panels, and visionary speakers — it’s also about listening to YOU, the audience, and what you feel is top of…

Disrupt Audience Choice vote closes Friday

Google says the new SDK would help Google expand on its core mission of connecting the right audience to the right content at the right time.

Google is launching a new Android feature to drive users back into their installed apps

Jolla has taken the official wraps off the first version of its personal server-based AI assistant in the making. The reborn startup is building a privacy-focused AI device — aka…

Jolla debuts privacy-focused AI hardware

OpenAI is removing one of the voices used by ChatGPT after users found that it sounded similar to Scarlett Johansson, the company announced on Monday. The voice, called Sky, is…

OpenAI to remove ChatGPT’s Scarlett Johansson-like voice

The ChatGPT mobile app’s net revenue first jumped 22% on the day of the GPT-4o launch and continued to grow in the following days.

ChatGPT’s mobile app revenue saw its biggest spike yet following GPT-4o launch

Dating app maker Bumble has acquired Geneva, an online platform built around forming real-world groups and clubs. The company said that the deal is designed to help it expand its…

Bumble buys community building app Geneva to expand further into friendships

CyberArk — one of the army of larger security companies founded out of Israel — is acquiring Venafi, a specialist in machine identity, for $1.54 billion. 

CyberArk snaps up Venafi for $1.54B to ramp up in machine-to-machine security

Founder-market fit is one of the most crucial factors in a startup’s success, and operators (someone involved in the day-to-day operations of a startup) turned founders have an almost unfair advantage…

OpenseedVC, which backs operators in Africa and Europe starting their companies, reaches first close of $10M fund

A Singapore High Court has effectively approved Pine Labs’ request to shift its operations to India.

Pine Labs gets Singapore court approval to shift base to India

The AI Safety Institute, a U.K. body that aims to assess and address risks in AI platforms, has said it will open a second location in San Francisco. 

UK opens office in San Francisco to tackle AI risk

Companies are always looking for an edge, and searching for ways to encourage their employees to innovate. One way to do that is by running an internal hackathon around a…

Why companies are turning to internal hackathons

Featured Article

I’m rooting for Melinda French Gates to fix tech’s broken ‘brilliant jerk’ culture

Women in tech still face a shocking level of mistreatment at work. Melinda French Gates is one of the few working to change that.

1 day ago
I’m rooting for Melinda French Gates to fix tech’s  broken ‘brilliant jerk’ culture

Blue Origin has successfully completed its NS-25 mission, resuming crewed flights for the first time in nearly two years. The mission brought six tourist crew members to the edge of…

Blue Origin successfully launches its first crewed mission since 2022

Creative Artists Agency (CAA), one of the top entertainment and sports talent agencies, is hoping to be at the forefront of AI protection services for celebrities in Hollywood. With many…

Hollywood agency CAA aims to help stars manage their own AI likenesses

Expedia says Rathi Murthy and Sreenivas Rachamadugu, respectively its CTO and senior vice president of core services product & engineering, are no longer employed at the travel booking company. In…

Expedia says two execs dismissed after ‘violation of company policy’

Welcome back to TechCrunch’s Week in Review. This week had two major events from OpenAI and Google. OpenAI’s spring update event saw the reveal of its new model, GPT-4o, which…

OpenAI and Google lay out their competing AI visions

When Jeffrey Wang posted to X asking if anyone wanted to go in on an order of fancy-but-affordable office nap pods, he didn’t expect the post to go viral.

With AI startups booming, nap pods and Silicon Valley hustle culture are back

OpenAI’s Superalignment team, responsible for developing ways to govern and steer “superintelligent” AI systems, was promised 20% of the company’s compute resources, according to a person from that team. But…

OpenAI created a team to control ‘superintelligent’ AI — then let it wither, source says

A new crop of early-stage startups — along with some recent VC investments — illustrates a niche emerging in the autonomous vehicle technology sector. Unlike the companies bringing robotaxis to…

VCs and the military are fueling self-driving startups that don’t need roads

When the founders of Sagetap, Sahil Khanna and Kevin Hughes, started working at early-stage enterprise software startups, they were surprised to find that the companies they worked at were trying…

Deal Dive: Sagetap looks to bring enterprise software sales into the 21st century

Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world…

This Week in AI: OpenAI moves away from safety

After Apple loosened its App Store guidelines to permit game emulators, the retro game emulator Delta — an app 10 years in the making — hit the top of the…

Adobe comes after indie game emulator Delta for copying its logo