PostHog raises a series D (and a small C)

Hello everyone!

We've raised $70m in primary capital at a "unicorn adjacent" valuation of $920M, led by Stripe, with YC, GV, and Formus Capital all participating.

We also made a hedgehog puppet, who is my cohost in the video above.

The future of PostHog

We already offer everything developers need to build successful products in one platform.

Five years ago we were just product analytics, but we expanded to include web analytics, session replay, experiments, feature flags, and surveys. More recently we've shipped a data warehouse, error tracking, and LLM observability. We're building a customer data platform (CDP), too.

We've had a clear vision for what we're building for a long time, but until recently we've struggled to describe this vision in a simple way. The answer came when Tim (my co-founder) and I went for a long walk around London. We decided to call it "customer infrastructure".

For us, customer infrastructure means:

1. One source of truth for your customers

We want to capture every interaction they have with your business. Every bug. Every feature used. Every sales conversation. Every support ticket. Every time they rage click a button that doesn't work. Every dollar of revenue.

2. Powering the business logic of your company

This means sending emails when customers abandon their basket. Triggering surveys when they churn. Automating a support response when they encounter a critical error. We want to put the tools to do this and data needed to power it in one place. No more data spaghetti.

3. Wrapping this all with AI

By having all the tools and data together in one platform, we can use AI to help automate a lot of the manual work needed to build products people love, and run your business more successfully. The more products we build, the better this gets.

You can already replace an entire stack of legacy data tools with PostHog – analytics, business intelligence, customer data platform, data warehouse, and so on. We also have great coverage for product, engineering, and growth use cases.

This funding round means we can build more products for support, sales, and marketing use cases, keep up with demand for our existing products, and ultimately automate the entire chain of tools that businesses use to grow by creating a perfect customer record.

Making AI the default interface of your business

Watching AI come crashing into the world of tech has been exhilarating.

We've long believed software was becoming commoditized. More open-source libraries, better tooling, more abstraction, and just more people in software engineering. These things were already speeding up development and gave us the confidence that we could build many products in one.

This was good for our customers (fewer vendors, lower prices per product, all your customer context in one place) and AI is enabling us to move even faster, and ship experiences that have never been possible before.

Today, we have Max AI – now generally available as an open beta – and an increasingly powerful AI installation wizard, which people love.

Right now, Max can:

• Put on a data analyst hat and explore your PostHog data in depth.
• Generate PostHog data visualizations, such as trends and funnel insights.
• Interact natively with the PostHog UI, for example by editing filters.
• Generate complex HogQL (our version of SQL) queries.
• Answer questions from our documentation.

Soon, Max will be able to:

• Watch your session replays and summarize them.
• Create feature flags, experiments or surveys.
• Write Hog functions to power your realtime destinations.
• Combine our tools and your data together to answer more abstracted questions.

Below is a sneak peek at the direction of travel, a conceptual demo of a "deep research mode" the Max AI team built in 48 hours during our recent offsite in Mexico.

Please bear in mind this was a hackathon project. It's a proof of concept that shows the kind of experience we want to build, not a representative demo using production data.

Imagine the above, across every customer product in your company. We think that’s worth building.

Why Stripe?

We really like Stripe because they’re hugely ambitious and low ego.

We’re a founder-controlled company with massive long-term ambitions and the Stripe team instantly got it because they're cut from the same cloth.

We've also learned a lot from working with Patrick and John over the years, like how to build a great company culture, innovate on product and, above all, adopt a user-first mindset at all times.

And, for the sake of the story, we think the butterfly effect moment was Patrick thinking our website was cool. This is a great reminder that the best way to meet interesting people is to consistently do cool stuff.

What about the Series C?

We aren’t just trying to collect the entire alphabet, we raised a Series C for two simple reasons:

1. We wanted to let our earliest employees sell some shares. We expanded this program during the Series D too, so that any employee could sell up to 20% of their vested shares.

2. We increased our founder control of the company as we felt this would set us up better long term. We raised relatively little primary capital (around $10M) because it wasn’t the goal – all at a decent increase in valuation from the series B.

I had intended on writing a big blog post about our philosophy here and the practical side of pulling this off, but got distracted. I will cover this topic at some stage in future as it’s interesting!

Acknowledgments

Tim and I used to feel in awe when reading announcements like this from other companies. They seemed glitzy and kind of implausible back when we were pivoting five times in a few months.

I’ve tried hard to avoid going all LinkedIn on you and talking about being humbled etc. That said, we have to acknowledge how our team has worked really, really hard to do the right thing for our users at all times. In doing so, we’ve become an industry standard – over 176k companies have signed up so far.

And our users have been really great to us, too. Cheering us on, using new things we’re shipping, and giving us feedback. We’re very lucky everyone has been so collaborative.

When you can get into a cycle like this, fundraising becomes a million times easier. What a ride!

Oh, and if you want to join us on that ride, we're always hiring.