RudderStack Announces $21m Series A and Launches RSDX, the First CDP for Developers

Blog Banner

As customer data projects become more important, engineering teams are increasingly leading these efforts, collaborating with marketing, product and data science teams to reveal insights and drive the customer journey with data.

Unfortunately, they face a poor choice of tools to help them build the required infrastructure. That choice is often between closed solutions designed for marketers, which limit flexibility, or building everything from scratch, which requires engineers to spend time on low-level plumbing problems.

RudderStack's goal is to provide developers with the open, flexible tools they need to build customer data infrastructure. As the leading open source Customer Data Platform (CDP), we provide data pipelines that make it easy to collect data from every application, website and SaaS platform, then activate it in your warehouse and business tools.

Today, we are announcing RSDX: the first CDP built for developers. RSDX combines Customer Data Platform capabilities, including out of the box connectors for over 150 apps, with a developer-first design that allows it to work the way developers already do, supporting Git workflows, programmable pipelines and native integrations with core systems like Snowflake and Kafka.

In addition, we're announcing a $21m round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from S28 Capital and Uncorrelated Ventures to help accelerate our mission. This funding will help bring RudderStack, already in use by leading brands like Crate and Barrel, Hinge and Priceline, to developers everywhere.

"The future of retail at Crate and Barrel is empowering a seamless customer experience by blending the inspiration of physical retail with data-driven personalized engagement online. After evaluating various technologies, we chose RudderStack as the foundation for our customer data platform that will help us innovate faster and deliver on our vision for growth, and we look forward to a great partnership."

Chris Frye, Director of Customer Facing Systems at Crate and Barrel

RudderStack RSDX - The First CDP for Developers

Engineers who work with customer data know that building for use cases like real-time personalization are often a challenge of infrastructure. Getting the right data to the right tool requires significant effort. Tools built for marketing activation are good at delivering specific experiences on the customer journey, but they’re bad at solving problems that require deeper integration—with the warehouse, with internal data tooling, and with existing development workflows run by data teams.

RSDX is the first CDP built to integrate seamlessly with engineers’ existing infrastructure and processes, so they can focus on delivering data products instead of plumbing pipes.

Open Source and Warehouse First

Most CDPs are closed systems that run pipelines and features in a black box. RudderStack is open source, so you can see exactly how the system works.

RudderStack RSDX is also warehouse-first. Instead of storing your data, RudderStack runs on top of modern warehouses like Snowflake and BigQuery, giving you full control over data enrichment, identity stitching and a 360 view of the customer that matches your business, not a third-party algorithm.

Programmable Pipelines

Delivering value through a modern data stack is more complex than sending data from a source to a destination. In RSDX, the pipelines themselves are programmable, enabling you to create fully customized data flows for every connection.

Programmable Pipelines enable intelligent event routing, the ability to hit external APIs from the live event stream, and change payload structures for simple setup of new destinations—all via flexible JavaScript functions.

DevOps for CDP

Instead of forcing users into a UI, RSDX was designed to meet developers in their existing workflows, making DevOps for customer data a seamless experience.

In RudderStack you can use gitflow via Github to manage data transformations and data governance. Multiple event stream APIs allow you to integrate pipeline testing testing into your existing CI/CD workflow. Rich Grafana dashboards provide you with detailed reporting on CDP infrastructure health and data delivery. And our statsd implementation can integrate with your existing alerting systems like Data Dog.

RudderStack Cloud and Open Source

RudderStack Cloud is generally available and you can try all of the features in RSDX for free for up to 500,000 events per month. Sign up today.

You can also deploy RudderStack Open Source, which is Kubernetes native. Check out our Github repo for more information.


June 10, 2021
Soumyadeb Mitra

Soumyadeb Mitra

Founder and CEO of RudderStack