History of PostHog

The history of PostHog begins on 23 January 2020, when James Hawkins and Tim Glaser founded the company.^[1] Its primary source is the handbook page "How we got here", which PostHog maintains in public.

Before PostHog[edit]

The founders began working together on a startup in August 2019. Their first idea was a tool to help engineers manage technical debt. It did not succeed, but the handbook records two conclusions they drew from it: that growth can be treated as an engineering problem, and that many engineers have no way to see the effect of what they build.^[1]

PostHog was their sixth idea. The handbook states that they had been pivoting roughly once a month for half a year.^[1]

Founding and first release[edit]

PostHog entered Y Combinator's W20 batch, and the handbook records that the founders realized within a couple of weeks of starting the batch that PostHog was what they should build.^[1]

They released the first version on Hacker News four weeks after writing the first line of code. Within a couple of days there were more than 300 self-hosted deployments, and two weeks later the GitHub repository had passed 1,500 stars.^[1]

The shape of that reception mattered to what the company became. The first users installed the software on their own servers, which is why the open-source distribution was not a marketing decision but the initial product.

Funding[edit]

PostHog has raised six rounds.

The handbook gives the total raised since 2020 as approximately $194m as of October 2025, at a valuation of about $1.4bn.^[1]

A discrepancy between the sources[edit]

The two PostHog sources disagree on the dates of the early rounds, and this article does not resolve the disagreement.

The handbook timeline narrates events as they happened and may date a round to its announcement; the press kit is the table PostHog gives to journalists.^[1][2] For a specific date, read both.

Growth[edit]

The handbook records the milestones the company chose to record, which is worth noting as a limitation: this is a company's account of itself.

• April 2020. The seed round closed and hiring began. The first engineers were Marius Andra, Eric Duong, and James Greenhill.^[3][5]
• March 2023. The company decided to build a data warehouse, which began its move from an analytics tool to a platform.^[1]
• December 2024. It ended the year cashflow positive, which the handbook says was mostly unplanned.^[1]
• February 2025. AI observability was built to watch what PostHog AI was costing, then shipped as a product.^[1]
• June 2025. Stripe led the Series D. The handbook records that the introduction began with a tweet from Patrick Collison about the PostHog website, about 18 months earlier.^[4]
• October 2025. The Series E closed, and PostHog offered employees a secondary share sale.^[6]
• Early 2026. PostHog released PostHog Desktop, which the handbook calls its biggest launch so far. Around the Series D the company stopped describing itself as an analytics company; its stated aim is now to make a product self-driving.^[1][7]

See also

References

1. ^PostHog handbook, "How we got here"
2. ^PostHog press kit, funding history
3. ^PostHog blog, "Raising $3m for an open-source project"
4. ^PostHog blog, "Series D"
5. ^PostHog founders, "Our first five hires"
6. ^PostHog blog, "How secondaries actually work"
7. ^PostHog Desktop

External links

• The PostHog story, in the handbook
• PostHog press kit