Preact raises $4.6M, launches ‘customer success’ service

Preact really wants you to be successful.

The San Francisco cloud-based software startup raised $4.6 million today in an Series A round that Trinity Ventures led. In tandem with the hefty windfall of venture cash, the company also released it’s new software platform that it said uses “leading-edge behavioral science, machine learning, and big data analytics.”

“It’s new high-level software that helps companies understand how their own customers are using their products,” chief executive Michael Geller told VentureBeat.

Preact was originally founded in Los Angeles in 2012 and moved shop to San Francisco to be closer to Silicon Valley and the S.F. tech scene. They are aggressively ramping up their current 15 member staff and have 40 customers who pay monthly annual fees. Geller says the startup launched with a $750,000 seed round and has been in stealth mode — until today.

Preact described what its software actually does:

“Preact is a cloud-based, automatic customer success service that helps subscription software companies maximize customer lifetime value by reducing churn, acquiring new customers, and driving up-sells. Preact provides health metrics tailored to each user and account by tracking detailed session-level usage of web usage, mobile applications, and server activity. Preact predicts and informs which customers are likely to churn, renew, or upgrade by modeling usage and behavior patterns using big data analytics, leading-edge behavioral science, and machine learning.”

The startup has managed to snare some heavy IT executives for its board, though, including Prakash Ramamurthy, Oracle’s senior VP of its cloud management business; and Chuck Dietrich, the former chief of SlideRocket and a general manager at Salesforce.

In a detailed press release, Preact added:

“In addition, Preact provides deep, real-time visibility into product usage to dramatically improve customer support and product quality.  Preact integrates its data into common workflow applications including Gmail, Marketo, Salesforce, Zendesk, Desk.com, and others.  Founded in 2012, Preact is based in San Francisco and funded by Trinity Ventures and other leading venture capital firms.”