HEAP

Matin Movassate and Ravi Parikh met at Brown University and co-founded Heap in 2013. The frustration was personal: every analytics tool at the time required developers to manually instrument events.

Want to know how many users clicked a specific button? Write code to log that event.

Deploy. Test.

Wait. Then remember to tag the next button too.

Heap flipped the model. It captured every interaction automatically — every click, tap, scroll, and form fill — from the moment you added one line of code.

The idea was: collect everything first, then figure out what questions to ask later. It sounds simple.

No one was doing it.

Heap is a SaaS analytics platform sold to product teams, data teams, and growth teams at mid-size to enterprise companies. Customers install a JavaScript snippet and Heap begins capturing every user interaction on their website or app automatically.

Teams then use Heap's interface to build funnels, analyze retention, and understand user journeys — retroactively, using data they already have, without waiting for an engineer to add tracking code. Companies pay based on session volume.

The product's appeal is speed to insight: you can answer questions about user behavior that would take weeks in a traditional instrumented analytics setup.

Heap's core offering is autocapture analytics — every user interaction captured automatically, retroactively queryable. On top of that foundation: Journeys, which visualizes the paths users take through a product rather than just the funnel you defined.

Illuminate uses machine learning to surface friction points and drop-off patterns automatically. And Heap Connect syncs Heap data into data warehouses like Snowflake and BigQuery.

Heap acquired Auryc in 2021 to add session replay capabilities. Following the Contentsquare acquisition, Heap's technology has been integrated into Contentsquare's broader digital experience analytics platform.

Heap's growth story is the autocapture idea selling itself. Developers who tried it were genuinely surprised — the setup was ten minutes, and historical analysis was available immediately.

Product-led growth drove early adoption, particularly among startups where speed of analysis mattered more than the enterprise contract process. The $100 million Series D in 2021 from Accel was supposed to fund the enterprise push.

The challenge was that by 2021, the market had caught up: Amplitude added autocapture features, Mixpanel improved its instrumentation tools, and FullStory's session replay gave digital teams a different angle on the same data. Heap had a strong product but faced a market that had learned from them.

The Contentsquare acquisition in 2023 — reportedly at a price well below their $1.3 billion 2021 valuation — is the chapter that defines Heap's story. The underlying challenge was go-to-market.

Heap was excellent at product-led trials and had strong NPS from users who loved the autocapture feature. Converting those enthusiastic users into large enterprise contracts at the pace needed to justify a unicorn valuation proved harder.

Longer sales cycles, budget scrutiny post-2022, and direct competition from better-resourced players compressed the growth rate. The product was differentiated.

The distribution wasn't differentiated enough.

Y Combinator backed Heap in their S13 batch. Social Capital led the Series A in 2016.

ICONIQ Capital led the Series B in 2018. NewView Capital led the Series C in 2019.

Accel led the Series D in 2021 at a $1.3 billion valuation — that round was the high-water mark. The acquisition by Contentsquare in 2023 gave investors a partial exit, but the return on the 2021 round was substantially below expectations.

It's a reminder that good products and good business outcomes don't always arrive at the same time.