Differentiate your data: Keen’s APIs let your company build custom analytics

Keen IO wants to help businesses out in a big, bad, data-crazed world.

The company develops APIs for custom analytics. Today it announced locking up $2.35 million in financing to cement its foothold in current verticals, which includes ad tech, gaming, and the Internet of Things, and go after other verticals.

“Analytics transforms data into answers – the kind of answers every company deserves,” the company said on its site. “Unfortunately, a lot of companies can’t find an analytics service that’s right for their specific needs and don’t have the resources to develop their own analytics infrastructure. That’s why we started Keen IO.”

Keen’s hosted analytics solution takes care of the nitty-gritty, backend work of setting up analytics infrastructure, so entrepreneurs can channel their resources elsewhere.

Startups choose what data they want measured (sign-ups, purchases, shares, errors) and from where (app, server, site, device) and Keen will store all that data in the cloud.

It offers visualization tools for charting data, and identifying value, trends, user patterns, bugs, and all the other metrics companies care about. The data can be shared with teams and customers, as well as white-labeled.

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Interest in data science and analytics is exploding — research firm Gartner surveyed 2,000 CIOs who reported that analytics and business intelligence is their number one priority in 2013.

Businesses of all types and sizes are using data (or want to use data) to make smarter business decisions and gain greater insight into what works and what doesn’t.

Big Data is also a sector that is changing rapidly, but companies that don’t make the most of these opportunities could find themselves left in the dust by competition.

Whether you are a small boutique coffee shop in Wisconsin, an international corporation, or even the government, data should play a role in operations.

There are dozens of analytics products out there — Google Analytics, KISSmetrics, MixPanel, to name a few — but often they don’t have all the features a company requires. Building your own analytics infrastructure is complicated and resource-intensive, and Keen is betting that companies will welcome the change to more easily create their own in-house database that focuses on their unique needs.

It operates at a level below other analytics tools, like those mentioned above.

Keen is free for developers tracking fewer than 50,000 events per month. From there the pricing increases in 6 tiers, based on number of events. Current customers include Kongregate, App.io, and ActiveProspect.

Rincon Venture Partners and Amplify Partners led this round.

Keen is based in San Francisco.