Mixpanel serves up unique mobile analytics, nabs $10M investment

Y Combinator startup Mixpanel dives deep into pageview and visitor engagement analytics, offering real-time “micro” stats. And it’s just raised its first institutional round of funding.

The company is making a big push for mobile analytics, an area it feels its competition, mainly Adobe’s Omniture and Google Analytics, isn’t addressing. Mixpanel has created tools to track how people use mobile apps and which features are ignored.

App developers and websites such as Facebook don’t have much use for pageview counts, Mixpanel cofounder Suhail Doshi told VentureBeat in an interview, so the company had to come up with other ways to measure engagement. These metrics include time spent using an app, number of return visitors, and tracking which features are used consistently.

Doshi used Viddy, one of Mixpanel’s customers, as an example of how its services cater to non-traditional analytics needs. For Viddy, Mixpanel tracks engagement by the number of people watching a specific video and by monitoring which users are coming back to watch more videos, Doshi told me. Since Google Analytics and Omniture focus on pageview tracking, Mixpanel feels its versatility gives it an edge over its competitors.

Mixpanel’s current round of $10 million comes more than two years after the company raised $500,000 in seed money. Andreessen Horowitz led the round and additional angel investors, including PayPal Co-founder Max Levchin, Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff, and Yammer chief executive David Sacks, participated.

“Mixpanel has been cashflow positive for awhile, so we weren’t in a hurry to raise funding,” said Doshi, “We plan to spoil the first one hundred people we hire with the funding.”

Mixpanel was founded in 2009 after going through the Y Combinator incubator program.

Mobile analytics image via Shutterstock and Flickr user mkandlez