Besides visibility into how users interact with their applications, companies also need the ability to act upon the information so that they can address potential weak points. Pendo.io Inc. is one of the few providers that offer both capabilities in the same offering.

The startup, which on Thursday announced the completion of a $25 million funding round, sells a cloud-based platform for optimizing in-app interactions. At its core is an analytics dashboard that lets project managers visualize user activity data from a service to identify patterns of interest. Pendo can display what percentage of the installed base has adopted a new feature, highlight functions that may need to be retired due to underuse and map out how visitors move through the interface.

A bank, for instance, could use the platform to identify the sections that customers visit most often after checking their balance in its web portal. Pendo also makes it possible to measure the amount of time spent on each page and other key metrics to find ways of better aligning the interface with user preferences.

The analytics dashboard is complemented by development features that enable companies to embed toolboxes in strategic locations to streamline common interactions. Pendo provides the ability to display a help box the first time a user navigates to an unfamiliar application page, or use the same pop-up format to gather feedback. The startup claims that such in-app polls attract up to three times as many responses than traditional email surveys.

Once they’ve collected enough replies, managers can correlate the feedback with the data in Pendo’s analytics dashboard to create a more complete picture. This expanded insight has the potential not only to provide better visibility into user experience but also to boost sales and marketing. If a software as a service provider finds that users with free accounts spend a lot of time on a task that’s handled automatically in the paid editions of its product, then it could reach out about an upgrade.

Pendo’s feature set has attracted big-name customers such as Salesforce.com Inc., Citrix Systems Inc. and Infor Inc. to name a few. Strong adoption helped the startup quadruple revenues in 2016, momentum that this week’s cash infusion should help maintain. 

The round was led by Battery Ventures and saw the participation of a half-dozen other backers including Salesforce’s startup investment arm. Pendo will use the capital to open new offices in San Francisco and New York, as well as to ramp up development efforts.

Image: Pendo