February 2022 Summaries

Census raised $60 million in its Series B funding round, led by Tiger Global and Insight Partners, with participation from Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz. The company aims to accelerate its growth and double down on its vision of becoming the central nervous system for all data, organizations, and use cases. Census launched new platform features, including Census Segments for marketers and Live API Inspector for data teams, which provide intuitive visual segment builders and full visibility to debug sync errors, respectively. The company also introduced a new OA Club Slack community to support operational analytics practitioners, as well as new destination connectors, including Asana, Criteo, Campaign Monitor, and others. Additionally, Census launched its G2 profile and offered a $50 gift card to customers who leave reviews.

In the integration platform landscape, Census stands out by focusing on data marshaling through a central source of truth, using a data warehouse as the best such source, and integrating data rather than events. This approach enables operational analytics, where high-fidelity data is loaded into a destination system's tables directly, bypassing the constraints of proprietary SaaS programming languages. By leveraging a tool like Census, users can reprogram their SaaS applications and tap into transformative power, making it an attractive opportunity for those looking to be part of this innovation.

At Census, they're committed to end-to-end observability, providing customers with detailed alerting and logging, as well as a Live API Inspector that gives row-level visibility into API calls, allowing data teams to debug issues in real-time. The inspector provides transparency around API requests and responses, enabling teams to track and fix errors proactively, ensuring consistency, reliability, and observability of the data being sent to destinations. With support for 90% of their connectors and multiple data formats, Census's API Inspector is a valuable tool for data wranglers to play Data Detective and figure out what failed in their pipeline.

Operational Analytics is an approach that centers on building a shared understanding between teams based on trusted, highly-accessible data from a warehouse, aiming to empower the data team to better serve data consumers and drive action. It's a tactical approach to using tools within the modern data stack more effectively towards a common goal. Operational Analytics bridges the gap between data and ops teams by making data available to frontline teams in real-time, allowing for trustworthy data and insight delivery, consistent picture across all tools, and reaching every customer at any scale at just the right time. By combining advanced tooling with the processes of DataOps, companies can revolutionize how they work with data, achieve better automation, understanding between cross-functional teams, and more effective workflows. Operational Analytics has made possible high-performing marketing campaigns that convert to reality, customer success outcomes such as reduced response times for common support issues, and sales teams' access to the data needed to build lasting relationships with customers at every step of the sales journey. To get started with Operational Analytics, companies can identify their biggest data pain point, get their data team and ops team on the other side talking about their needs, and start with small projects such as sending metrics to Slack.

The Operational Analytics Club is a community launched by Census, aimed at facilitating discussion and resource sharing among data professionals. The club is not about Census itself, but rather about its members who are building the future of the data industry. Parker Rogers, a data advocate for the club, shares his background in data science and analytics, and how he joined Census to solve problems related to data syncing and operational analytics. He expresses excitement about the club's potential to provide valuable resources and support for data professionals, particularly those looking for practical advice on using data to drive action rather than just scorekeeping.

The Operational Analytics Club is a community for talented data people to support each other in their careers through sharing expertise and experience. The club aims to bring together individuals with unique skills and backgrounds, from first-time data hires to seasoned leaders, to foster collaboration and knowledge-sharing. With the help of Census, the club offers various programs such as AMAs with data experts, exclusive events, networking opportunities, mentorship, educational resources, scholarships, and access to cutting-edge content. The initiative is driven by a desire to educate the people who will build the future of data, putting resources into the community to facilitate growth and learning. By joining the Operational Analytics Club, individuals can connect with like-minded professionals, learn from industry experts, and contribute to the wider community.

To help marketers activate the 360° data in their warehouse, Census Segments is now part of Audience Hub, a suite of features built for marketing teams to work with trusted data from their company's source of truth. This single place allows users to build audience segments on top of their data warehouse and sync them with all advertising and marketing tools, eliminating the need for CSV uploads or SQL queries. With Census Segments, marketers can experiment with audiences faster, using a visual segment builder that creates personalized audiences without manual CSV uploads or complicated SQL queries. The feature includes integrations with dbt and Looker models, approval processes to verify trusted data models, and a library of advertising and marketing connectors, including new additions like TikTok, Snapchat, and Bing. Data teams can also make trusted models available for self-serve by marketing teams, while ensuring seamless collaboration through features such as approval processes and integrations with dbt and Looker models. The feature is now live and available at no cost to users on all plans, including free.

Census, a company that enables product-led companies to drive better marketing, sales, and customer success with its reverse ETL tool, has raised $60M Series B to build and expand its Operational Analytics platform. This platform aims to centralize all data in a single system, empower more analysts, and treat data like a product using software development principles like versioning, testing, and continuous delivery. With this approach, companies can create a virtuous cycle of growth by making their data teams stakeholders, leading to immense leverage and pressure on data teams to deliver trusted data. The platform's vision is to turn data teams into a platform that serves the organization at scale, solving traditional point-to-point data integration chaos and embracing the idea that data infrastructure should be in the critical path of live business workflows.