E‑commerce man­agers look­ing for extra insight into their web­sites’ per­for­mance may be inter­est­ed to learn of recent devel­op­ments at Keen IO.

Hav­ing scooped a cred­itable $2.35 mil­lion in fund­ing, the com­pa­ny is now offer­ing cus­tomers a toolk­it that enables report­ing through build­ing cus­tomized ana­lyt­ics products.

In essence it works like this: Keen IO’s appli­ca­tion pro­gram­ming inter­face (API) pro­vides a range of func­tions that help devel­op­ers refine and pro­file all the dis­parate infor­ma­tion that’s fly­ing round at the back­end. Cus­tomers can source, store and visu­al­ize it in any way they want, which should mean that com­pa­nies have a degree of extra flex­i­bil­i­ty that’s dif­fi­cult to attain with out-of-the-box solutions.

If his recent remark that you “can’t rely on out-of-the-box parts for every­thing” is any­thing to go by, co-founder and CEO Kyle Wild obvi­ous­ly thinks so. He went on to out­line exact­ly why: “One of my favorite exam­ples is a smart­watch. Nobody is going to make an out-of-the-box smart­watch ana­lyt­ics prod­uct, it’s just too fragmented.”

Very cred­itable, but e‑commerce ana­lysts with their fin­gers on the pulse will be won­der­ing exact­ly how much time and mon­ey this approach can save their orga­ni­za­tion. The answer, accord­ing to Wild, is that many cus­tomers check in with Keen IO when they are toy­ing with build­ing their own ana­lyt­ics tools, but real­ize that doing it with Keen’s toolk­it is faster – and in the first instance at least – cheap­er. Oth­er cus­tomers may have pre-built a sys­tem but call in Keen when it begins to break down.

To demon­strate the pro­duc­t’s all-round chops, Wild cites the exam­ple of track­ing con­ver­sion fun­nels. Designed to track the nav­i­ga­tion path of users on a web­site, these are dif­fi­cult to ana­lyze with­out the pro­vi­sion of the req­ui­site tools. Using the Keen IO API, devel­op­ers could cre­ate an appro­pri­ate fun­nel using rel­a­tive­ly sim­ple code – a boon for web con­tent man­agers charged with the respon­si­bil­i­ty of judg­ing the rel­a­tive effec­tive­ness of dif­fer­ent parts of the site.

A beta ver­sion of the soft­ware was launched in 2012 and the com­pa­ny start­ed to charge cus­tomers after only four months in 2013. Sub­se­quent growth has seen it edge clos­er to prof­itabil­i­ty in what seems like a very short win­dow. Seed fund­ing was sup­plied by Ampli­fy Part­ners and Rin­con Ven­ture Part­ners, with con­tri­bu­tions from Pelion Ven­ture Part­ners, 500 Star­tups, XG Ven­tures, Jason Seats and Lau­ren Siebert.