Announcing Inspector and Avo’s $3M Seed round
Published: 2020-09-03 15:54:03

We started Avo in 2018 because we believe we can change the way organizations use data to make better decisions for their customers. We’ve been blown away by the impact Avo has had on data quality and developer productivity for our customers. From startups to consumer brands like Rappi, Patreon, TripAdvisor, Sotheby’s, and more, it’s been incredible to see our product fundamentally change the way PMs, devs and data scientists collaborate to plan, track and govern their product analytics. Today, we have some exciting news to share about our progress, a new powerful product offering, and where we’re headed next.



##What is Avo?##
Avo is next-generation analytics governance. We’re changing how product managers, developers, and data scientists plan, track, and govern analytics across organizations. Before Avo, teams were forced to choose between product delivery speed and reliable insights. 

By using Avo, [Patreon has reclaimed 9 out of every 10 hours they used to spend implementing or fixing analytics, going from 4 days for every feature release](https://www.avo.app/customers/patreon-case-study), to 1 hour. 

Companies have never had to understand their customers better or faster. Consumers choose the product with the best experience and companies can’t afford to stall product decisions while waiting days or weeks for answers from a centralized BI team. In truth, the industry gold standard is to decentralize business intelligence completely, so that every team is autonomous in making data-driven decisions quickly. Spotify is just one example of a company working under this org-structure. 

But data is brittle and bad data leads to incorrect assumptions. With everyone making data-driven decisions, it’s critical to govern data quality, iterate quickly on the product and business, and avoid customer churn. 

We solved this problem ourselves at QuizUp, to ensure engineering and product time wasn’t wasted re-implementing analytics every time we shipped to our 100M users. Avo solves this more permanently as a SaaS platform without diverting precious time from the core product or accruing technical debt. The result is that we’re helping organizations grow by removing friction around analytics governance and implementation.‍

##Introducing Inspector##
The first step to better analytics governance is knowing what’s wrong with your data. Typically, getting that understanding has been a company-wide initiative that takes months or years, and requires buy-in and collaboration from the VP Product, Head of Data, and VP Engineering.

Today we’re excited to announce the [Avo Inspector](https://www.avo.app/inspector). Avo Inspector plays into our larger vision of empowering self-serve analytics. 

Inspector processes event streams, parses event shapes (no PII data), visualizes the entire current state of tracking for the company, highlights tracking issues such as type mismatches, missing properties, and volume discrepancies. We built Inspector because we had helped our customers do this manually too many times. 

With Inspector, our customers get instant insight into what is wrong with their analytics, so they can prioritize the most important issues to fix, and start cleaning and future proofing their analytics step-by-step. 

So far, we’re getting great early feedback. On-demand delivery unicorn Rappi is just one of the customers using Inspector: 


*“This year we scaled to meet the demand of 100,000 new customers digitizing their deliveries and curbside pickups. The problem with every new software release was that we’d break analytics. It represented 25% of our Jira tickets.” Says Rappi’s Head of Engineering, Damian Sima, “In our first week with the Avo Inspector, we’re already discovering tracking issues like missing properties and type mismatches. Now we know what to fix and can do that with Avo.”*


Here’s how Inspector works:

**1. Inspect your current tracking automatically.**
Install the Inspector SDK to observe a living summary of current tracking across platforms. Inspector doesn’t gather any user data, only event shapes and volumes.

**2.Analyze tracking issues instantly**
Inspector dashboard highlights your current event tracking issues, so different stakeholders can discuss and prioritize what to fix.

**3.Prioritize what matters**
The inspector dashboard gives you and your team the overview you need, to prioritize the tracking changes that will have the biggest impact on cleaning up mission-critical metrics so you can make progress quickly.

**4.Clean, step-by-step**
Use your complete overview of what needs to be fixed across platforms, to fix top priority issues with clear event and property definitions, implemented with type safe analytics.

**5.Future proof**
Great product analytics help teams make the best decisions to grow their business. Truly useful metrics for today and beyond are transparent — where everyone knows which events can help answer their questions — and reliable, consistent data, easy to evolve and implement as the product grows.


If you’re curious about the infrastructure and behind the scenes (as you should be!), [learn more about Inspector](https://www.avo.app/inspector), [reach out](mailto:hi@avo.app) or subscribe to our [newsletter](https://www.getrevue.co/profile/avo).


##Avo is scaling with the help of world-class developer and data tool investors##
To build on our momentum, [we’ve raised $3M](https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/03/avo-raises-3m-for-its-analytics-governance-platform/) from GGV Capital with participation from Heavybit, Y Combinator and others, to make Avo a game changer for democratizing analytics. 

I’d like to use this opportunity to thank all the incredible people who have believed in our team and our mission, and supported us throughout this journey. A special shoutout to Hjalli and Investa, Gustaf, Jared, Aaron, Kevin, Kat, Michael and all the YC folks, Joe, Tom, Dana, Jesse and James at Heavybit, Glenn, Oren, Tai and the entire crew at GGV, the Brunnur team, Jenny and co at Crowberry, Pete at Optimizely, Coby at Radar, Sandy, Ari and more. In addition to our investors, we’re surrounded with smart and generous people who have hosted us on their couches in San Francisco, helped us hire, advised us on Avo, introduced us to great people, et cetera; thank you to Spencer, June, Gunni, Jói, Aliya, Drew, Kiddi, Siggi, Hilmar, Arndís, Andrés, Kjartan, Paul, Gummi, Vala, Austin, Brian & Michael, Leslie, Shuo, Alex, Ron and so many more.

Sölvi and I are proud to have been joined by an [outstanding team](https://avo.app/about) of exceptionally kind, talented, and driven humans on this mission, who we are honored to be working with every day.

Our focus in the coming months will be helping more organizations uplevel their analytics governance fast, so they can join the global shift to self-serve analytics culture. We will also continue to focus on developer experience and seamless collaboration between product managers, developers and data scientists – because we don’t want teams to have to choose between product delivery speed and reliable analytics anymore.

‍

P.S. [We're hiring!](https://avo.app/jobs) Come work with us in our remote-first culture (since way before COVID 😅) and diverse and inclusive team 💛