Nine months after its public launch, Verb Data, a customer-facing analytics company, took in $3 million in funding to continue developing technology so that SaaS companies can build better in-product dashboards for their customers.
Founders Dave Hurt and Oleg Fridman started the Boston-based company in January 2020 and started its private beta program with five customers in August 2020, then launched to the public in April 2021.
Verb’s customer-facing analytics tools are built specifically to live inside multi-tenant SaaS applications, CEO Hurt told TechCrunch via email. What makes it different from competitors is the way it makes simpler the process of building and maintaining customer-facing dashboards by non-technical team members by reporting and automating the data infrastructure that supports those data experiences.
“For example, every chart that is built and embedded into a customer’s application is backed by a data warehouse that is specifically optimized for that chart without requiring any developer effort,” he added. “This allows software teams to focus on their core product while also providing their end-users with high-performing analytics dashboards.”
The funding round was led by El Cap Holdings and lead investors Stew Bradley and Kunal Tandon. Individual investors also participating include Stan Garber, Alex Yakubovich, Matt MacInnis, Steve Garrity and Packy McCormick.
The company counts dozens of companies as customers, including Encamp, BidOps, SwipeBy and ReviveMedia. Hurt attributes Verb’s flexibility for enabling customers to use the tools in a way that is unique to their needs.
Some are using it for embedded product dashboards, some are using it inside of Notion as a client analytics portal and others use Verb for customer success management or as a sales tool.
“Verb has allowed us to supercharge our efforts around both internal and customer reporting,” Ben Leiken, CTO at Bid Ops, a predictive sourcing software company, said via email. “Thanks to their powerful features, we’re able to instantly deploy changes and test new features with customers — all without needing to wait for our next release.”
Prior to this new funding, Verb Data raised an undisclosed pre-seed round in 2020 that helped it complete its private beta and get to the public launch, Hurt said. He plans to invest in building out the company’s engineering team and on product development. Verb has 15 employees, up from seven at this time last year.
Some of the features coming down the pipeline in the first quarter include map data and charts for greater flexibility and use with Verb’s modularized drag-and-drop editor. Users will also be able to visualize their data on maps on existing dashboards to allow for better reporting.
In addition, Verb is working on additional data source integrations from existing partners, an updated design styles library and Slack integration for quicker and easier communication when a dashboard is created, Hurt said.
Hurt said the company was focused on customer growth over revenue, so he did not have year over year metrics to share, but did say that over the past six months, Verb had 65 new signups with an overall conversion rate of 20%. In July that rate increased to 30%. The company intends to raise another round of funding in the third quarter of 2023 and expects to have 100 paying customers by the end of 2023.
“The SaaS market is becoming more vertical-specific, which means that companies are competing on core functionality in their respective niche,” Hurt said. “While this generally means that end-customers are benefiting from software that more closely aligns with their needs, it also means that product teams have to focus on their core functionality to keep up with competition, making the analytics dashboard an even more difficult feature to prioritize on the roadmap.”
