Statsig will take the A/B Testing applications that drove Facebook's growth and put similar functionalities in the hands of any product department so they can also make faster, more data-informed decisions about building the products customers want.On Thursday, the Seattle-based company announced $10.4 million Series A funding. It was led by Sequoia Capital with participation from Madrona Venture Group, Segment cofounder Calvin French-Owen and a group individual investors.Vijaye Raji, the co-founder and CEO of the company, started it with seven former Facebook colleagues in February. However, the idea for the company was born more than a decade ago.TechCrunch was told by him that he worked at Facebook and had the opportunity to build A/B testing apps like Quick Experiments, Gatekeeper, and Deltoid. Statsig saw an opportunity to create these features outside of Facebook to allow other companies with products to develop but not enough time to build their own quick testing capabilities to be equally successful.Statsigs platform allows product developers to quickly run product experiments and analyze user reactions to new features. Pulse, Experiments+, and AutoTune enable hundreds of experiments per week. Business metrics help product teams build and ship the best products to their customers.Raji plans to use the funding to hire people in the areas of product, design, data science, and sales. Since February, the team has grown to 14 members.He said that we already have customers who are asking for specific features. But now, we want to scale them and make them more widely available.Statsig does not require a subscription nor upfront fees. It already serves millions of customers every month, including Common Room, Clutter and Take App. Statsig will offer customers a free trial of features and a Pro Tier for 5 cents per event. This allows Statsig to grow with each customer.Raji believes that Statsig adoption comes from several places. Developers and engineers are downloading the software and then using it to help a few thousand people per month. Referrals are also an option. He said that the adoption Statsig is seeing is coming from the bottom, which is exactly what Statsig is looking for. The company now talks to larger customers.Raji says there are many competitors to this product, including incumbents on the market. However, they mainly focus on features while Statsig provides insight and ties metrics back into features. The company also offers automated analysis, which is a benefit over other products that require manual setup and analysis.Mike Vernal, Sequoia partner, worked for Facebook before joining the venture capital firm. He had previously worked with Raji and called him a top-1% engineer that he enjoyed working with.He has sat on numerous company boards and found that companies spend a lot of time discussing sales and marketing but little about product. It is difficult to obtain precise numbers for planning purposes so it is just a discussion about the past and future plans.Vernal stated that he enjoys Statsig's ability to measure so companies don't have to put together a poorer version.Statsig is able to set up an experiment, tell whether someone likes blue or green buttons, and answer questions such as what the effect of the experiment on user growth, retention, and monitorization. It is a unique ability to answer holistic questions and determine the impact of any feature on any metric. This was not possible before the data stack matured.
