This episode of The Analytics Edge, sponsored by NetSpring, features an interview with Soumyadeb Mitra, Founder and CEO at RudderStack, the leading warehouse Customer Data Platform that’s purpose-built for data teams. RudderStack is an open-source, enterprise-ready platform for collecting, storing, and routing customer event data to your data warehouse and dozens of other tools.

After founding the company in 2019, Soumyadeb led RudderStack to 100+ employees and a $56 million Series B funding round in 2022. Prior to RudderStack, he co-founded Mariana, a VC-funded B2B martech startup, which was later acquired by 8x8 in 2018. Soumyadeb earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

In this episode, Soumyadeb talks about the founding stories behind RudderStack, the evolution of Customer Data Platforms, and the significant impact that a warehouse-centric CDP approach has on business.

Key Quotes

“We want to look at product funnels and customer journeys, but then combine that with Salesforce data, right? I mean, I want to look at funnels separately for enterprise customers and customers who closed versus customers where we are competing with a specific vendor and so on. And this is a very standard thing I would imagine. I mean, we see that across all our companies, but it was surprisingly hard to do with a lot of these cloud product analytics tools, right? They're amazing tools, but then they're only designed to ingest a specific kind of data. And if you want to combine other data sources, it becomes really fragile and complicated to set up those data pipelines, right? So yeah, I think Warehouse-native enables that and kind of unlocks that set of use cases. Plus there are all these challenges around data privacy, which again, it's not so much for a company like us, but at scale, it becomes a problem, right? I mean, you're centralizing your data in a data warehouse. Why do you need to ship everything to another vendor to do specific parts of your analytics? It just does not make good sense..” - Soumyadeb Mitra