Ex-Twilio team launches Propel, a platform to build revenue-generating analytics products
Propel Data Cloud, Inc. is thrilled to announce its transition to general availability after two fruitful years of collaboration with design partners including Tackle, Tango, Lumeo and PropertyVista.
Propel has raised $5.5 million in total funding led by Matrix Partners, with participation from John Wolthuis (Co-founder at Twilio), Ott Kaukver (former CTO at Twilio and Checkout.com), Andrew Konwinski (Co-founder of Databricks and Perplexity AI), Evan Weaver (former CTO at FaunaDB), Manu Sharma (Co-founder & CEO at Labelbox), and Marc Boroditsky (former CRO at Twilio and Cloudflare).
Prior to founding Propel, the company’s founders (Nico Acosta, Tyler Wells and Mark Roberts) previously spent a decade at Twilio building API, data, and AI products.
Like many modern companies, Twilio stored vast amounts of product usage data, which was primarily used internally to improve services. The team realized that exposing a customer’s usage data back to them directly (as an analytics product) unlocked significant business opportunities.
For example, one of the analytics products they launched, Voice Insights, quickly became one of Twilio’s fastest revenue growing products. It provided direct analytics access via API to high-value platform customers, and resulted in 60% net-dollar expansion on accounts who adopted it.
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However, it required significant resources; by the time the team left Twilio, over 100 engineers were working on customer-facing data products across the company, some of which took years to build.
Propel exists to allow companies to build revenue-generating + compliant (SOC2 Type 2, GDPR and CCPA) analytics products without additional engineering resources.
Don’t just “pull another report real quick”
Customer-facing analytics products evolve over time: a company may start with simple embedded analytics reporting within an application.
This brings more complex data requests from large, high-value customers, as it did at Twilio for Propel’s founding team: requests to “pull a report real quick,” fulfilled by solutions engineers or customer success managers.
Propel exists to replace this manual and insecure method of sharing data with high-value customers or partners, replacing it with secure and monetizable analytics products.
As Joe McCorkle, SVP of Product, Engineering and Operations at Property Vista put it:
“My goal is to accelerate the process of getting meaningful business event-driven data to our customers. Propel makes this an easy and scalable process. Customers need this data to run their business, to know what’s going on so they’re not flying blind.”
Deliver completely on your customer-facing analytics roadmap
The Propel platform, as of this General Availability launch, is the most complete end-to-end solution for building customer-facing analytics products.
As customer-facing analytics products are often a secondary SKU or Enterprise packaging add-on, it can be challenging to dedicate engineering resources to them.
As Seth Carney, CTO at Courier, explained:
Our analytics footprint wasn’t as deep as we wanted. Other stuff to build was more important. Customer-facing analytics was on the roadmap, but it was always perpetually two quarters out. I’ve had to own [customer-facing analytics] in the past, and it’s not cheap. If you were to build what Propel gives you…you’d need a data team, an engineering team, you’d need to build and implement the UI, caching, performance optimizations, and maintenance of the data. It adds up.
Propel supports companies through the complete analytics product development lifecycle, with a full complement of data ingestion methods (batch + streaming), transformations, APIs and UI components.
