Today, we’re excited to announce our investment in Segment, a leading provider of customer data infrastructure. We’re thrilled to partner with CEO Peter Reinhardt and the rest of his team on their journey to building a Company of Consequence.
Segment provides technology to help companies ensure their customers have highly relevant, personalized experiences no matter where they interact. They do this by giving companies the ability to collect, unify, and connect their first-party data to hundreds of marketing, analytics, and data warehousing business tools.
Segment has built an elegant, yet powerful solution for one of the most acute problems businesses are facing: how to leverage siloed, first-party customer data to power a wide variety of use cases.
Peter was nice enough to discuss below why he chose to partner with Sapphire, but first, more on why we’re excited to help Segment scale.
Why Partner with Segment?
Rajeev Dham: VCs love referring to “pattern recognition.” Well, there’s no difference in this situation. At Sapphire, we feel we have been fortunate to partner with data & analytics businesses such as Alteryx, Looker, Reltio, ThoughtSpot, Alation, as well as business & marketing applications like ExactTarget, Outreach, and Pendo. As a result, we’ve gained a deep appreciation for the solutions that Segment delivers. There is a clear need for a single data infrastructure that enables better analytics, execution of customer intelligence applications, and consequently, a better customer experience.
In addition, given our experience with MuleSoft, we’ve seen how “middleware” — traditionally relegated as a second-class citizen to business applications — is actually crucially important within the stack. Segment has strategic real-estate that is oftentimes stickier than the applications they empower.
Big markets drive big businesses. Unlike very specific point solutions or software targeted at slices of the market (SMBs, vertical SaaS, B2B-only, etc.), we believe Segment addresses all businesses. Our customer diligence revealed that everyone ranging from Fortune 50 B2B enterprises to direct-to-consumer start-ups are leveraging Segment for their core data infrastructure. We believe Segment can be the next horizontal platform to power digital transformation initiatives for all companies.
Finally, one of our key learnings about successful software businesses is the ability for CEOs to tell the story in a way that inspires confidence from investors, employees and of course customers. This ability is oftentimes exhibited by charismatic, sales-driven CEOs, but we’ve found that charisma comes in all forms. Over the last several years, Peter inspired our confidence by showing he has a keen sense for the challenges his customers encounter with their customer data. Moreover, he can articulate the vision of what Segment is providing in an elegant manner, actually quite similar to the product itself. We believe his clarity of thought and conviction about his product positioning and vision, despite having the potential to be pulled in many directions, will propel Segment to further cement their industry leadership.
Why Partner with Sapphire Ventures?
Peter Reinhardt: We wanted to partner with Sapphire because we know how deeply engaged and committed they are to the success of their portfolio companies. They have an incredible track record helping some of the industry’s most important companies build and scale their businesses. Rajeev and team really took the time to understand our business and needs, well before any financing discussions took place. It was very clear to us that they always go the extra mile.
Building a Company of Consequence
We are thrilled to welcome Peter and Segment to the Sapphire family and can’t wait for the journey ahead!
