Mixpanel picks up $1.25 million for analytics

Real-time data analytics company for startups funded by Sequoia and people from Square, PayPal, Bebo

Real-time Web analytics platform Mixpanel is announcing Friday that it has raised $1.25 million from new investors Sequoia Capital and Keith Rabois, COO at Square, we've confirmed with the company. Previous investors include Y Combinator, Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal, and Michael Birch, co-founder of Bebo.

Features offered by Mixpanel are pretty comprehensive. You’ve got basic email analytics, like open rates and click-through rates to see how links within the email perform. Track retention rates to see how many users keep coming back to the service for more, or see how your iPhone and Android apps are performing. Mixpanel even lets you extend analytics visibility to your users, so they can see what you can see. Or you can just export the data using the company’s API.

The real attraction of Mixpanel, however, is that all its analytics are done in real-time, a big advantage versus Google Analytics.

Pricing for Mixpanel ranges, depending on how many users and, in turn, data points your business needs to manage. The most popular plan ($150 per month, 500K data points), targeting startups, is recommended for “companies just starting out” and with a few thousand users. Other plans run from $350 (2 million data points) to $1000 (8M data points) to $1600 (20M data points), though Mixpanel is willing to develop individual plans for companies that demand even more data. You can try Mixpanel out for free with 25,000 data points, which could be useful enough for small side projects.

(By the way, Mixpanel says it values one data point as tracking one event, like a song play or user comment.)

Current Mixpanel customers include Ubisoft, Bebo, Quora, Kabam, Posterous and BitTorrent. The San Francisco-based startup started in June 2009 and launched in July 2009, and today it serves approximately 2000 sites.

The new funding will primarily be used to hire more engineers.