Exclusive: Statsig raises $100 million at $1.1 billion valuation after abandoned Datadog acquisition attempt May 6, 2025 |
Vijaye Raji has taken his fair share of leaps in his decades-long career. “I like to jump off cliffs without parachutes,” he told Fortune.
Born in India, he flew across the world to Seattle in the early aughts to take a job at Microsoft as a software engineer. Then, he jumped ship in 2011 to Facebook (now Meta) before it had gone public. And after a decade at the social media giant, he decided to bet on himself. “I don’t want to go to a large company. I don’t want to go to a startup,” he said. “I want to do my own.”
In 2021, the tech veteran founded Statsig, which helps software engineering teams test, analyze, and roll out new products. Four years later, the founder and CEO has bet on himself once more. He and his team have inked a $100 million Series C deal at a valuation of $1.1 billion after ending acquisition talks with the publicly traded software company Datadog, Fortune can exclusively report. ICONIQ Growth led the round, with participation from Sequoia and Madrona. (The startup raised $80 million through primary share issuances and allowed employees with vested equity to cash out $20 million.)
After exploring an acquisition of Statsig, Datadog bought its rival Eppo for $220 million, Upstarts Media first reported. Statsig and Eppo are such direct competitors that, when Fortune searched “Eppo” on Google, Statsig paid to promote a page on its website titled: “Don’t Get Eppo | Try Statsig.” Eppo, of course, has its own page arguing why its services are superior.
Datadog confirmed the acquisition on Monday but did not specify the terms of the deal. Media representatives for Eppo and Datadog did not respond to requests for comment. Raji declined to comment on reported negotiations with Datadog but said the “healthy competition” between Statsig and Eppos has turned their sector into a “meaningful category.”
The hundreds of millions of dollars spent on Eppo and Statsig beg the question: Why are investors so excited?
Every software company rolls out changes to their platforms. They can be as massive as a new app or as miniscule as a slight tweak to the checkout page. Often, the timing and choice of which features get rolled is decided by personality as much as anything else, said Raji. “Sometimes the loudest voice or the highest-paid person’s opinion is to one that actually prevails,” he added.
But, in the age of big data, opinion is no substitute for precision. When Raji was at Meta, he saw first-hand the importance of experimentation based on data, he said. The social media giant would see, for example, whether a tweak to the appearance of Facebook’s timeline would translate to increased engagement for a subset of users before pushing out the change to billions.
It’s a laborious process and requires specialized know-how. In fact, Statsig is short for “statistically significant,” a term in statistics for when a result is deemed valid enough to not be due to chance. “We left Facebook with the conviction that we can build all the tools that we had access to inside Facebook,” Raji said.
And that’s what he did. The four-year-old startup has notched $40 million in annualized revenue as it’s attracted a stream of customers, from human resources startup Rippling to the productivity app Notion. “Without Statsig, without experimentation, I think we will be just running the business blind,” Ekanth Sethuramalingam, engineering lead at the company at Notion, told Fortune.
Tech giant OpenAI is also a customer, according to Statsig’s website. With the rise of Github’s Copilot and similar services like Cursor, programmers have increasingly used AI to generate large swathes of code. These reams of text can quickly become a black box. “When you use AI, you’re gonna have to measure, and you’re gonna have to figure out, ‘Did my product hit the mark?’” Raji said.
A spokesperson for Statsig declined to comment on whether the company has hit the mark of profitability yet but did say that the startup was moving to a new office in two months as they onboard 30 new employees. “AI accelerated our journey,” Raji declared.
Ben Weiss
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Email: benjamin.weiss@fortune.com
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VENTURE DEALS
- Exterra, a Montreal-based carbon removal company, raised $20 million in Series A funding. Clean Energy Ventures and BDC Capital led the round and was joined by the Government of Quebec, Investissement Quebec, MOL Switch, and Karpowership.
- QbDVision, an Austin-based drug development and manufacturing digitization company, raised $13 million in Series A funding. Northpond Ventures and S3 Ventures led the round and were joined by Create Health Ventures and other existing investors.
- Dinari, a San Francisco-based investment platform, raised $12.7 million in Series A funding. Hack VC and Blockchange Ventures led the round and were joined by VanEck Ventures, F-Prime, Blizzard the Avalanche Fund, and others.
- Marveri, a Cambridge, Mass.-based Ai-powered corporate diligence platform, raised $3.2 million in funding from Alven, Day One Ventures, Lightscape Partners, angel investors, and others.
- diio, a Puerto Varas, Chile-based AI-powered sales assistant, raised $2.5 million in seed funding from Base10 Partners.
- ReportAId, a Milan-based AI-powered medical record interpretation platform, raised €2.2 million ($2.5 million) in pre-seed funding. Italian Founders Fund led the round and was joined by Heartfelt, Exceptional Ventures, 2100 Ventures, angel investors, and others.
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PRIVATE EQUITY
- Thoma Bravo invested $100 million in HubSync, a Franklin, Tenn.-based tax and accounting platform.
- Advantage Capital invested $11.5 million in Specialty Printing, a Windsor, Conn.-based label manufacturer.
- BVP Forge acquired a majority stake in Vector, a San Francisco-based logistics workflow platform for shippers, carriers, and receivers. Financial terms were not disclosed.
- E Source, a portfolio company of Align Capital Partners, acquired ILLUME Advising, a Madison-based consulting firm for the utility industry. Financial terms were not disclosed.
- Great Hill Partners led a majority recapitalization of Vision Government Solutions, a Hudson, Mass.-based appraisal services provider. Weatherford Capital and the existing Vision leadership team also participated. Financial terms were not disclosed.
- Jennmar, a portfolio company of FalconPoint Partners, acquired Rohrig Heavy Equipment Maintenance, a Wheeling, W. Va.-based equipment maintenance and repair services provider for the construction, mining, and oil and gas industries. Financial terms were not disclosed.
OTHER
- Juniper Square acquired Forstone Luxembourg, a Luxembourg-based alternative investments services provider. Financial terms were not disclosed.
- SKY Leasing acquired JetBlue Ventures, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm, from JetBlue Airways. Financial terms were not disclosed.
IPOS
- eToro Group, a Bnei Brak, Israel-based trading and investment platform, plans to raise $50 million in an offering of 10 million shares (50% secondary) priced between $46 and $50 on the Nasdaq. The company posted $12.6 billion in revenue for the year ending Dec. 31, 2024. Spark Capital, BRM Group, Andalusian Private Capital & Advisory, SBT, and CM Equities back the company.
FUNDS + FUNDS OF FUNDS
- Atlas Holdings, a Greenwich, Conn.-based investment firm, raised $6.5 billion for its fifth fund focused on manufacturing and distribution businesses.
PEOPLE
- Lightspeed, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based venture capital firm, added Bucky Moore as a partner. Previously, he was at Kleiner Perkins.
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