There's a fundamental change taking place in the way that organizations make decisions. For analysts and data scientists, the days of being forced to use conventional, monolithic data tools are ending. The individuals who answer the hardest questions within an organization can use the tools they choose. These tools let them investigate a problem, solve it, and move on.
At Mode, we've helped bring about this change. In 2018, after years of success selling Mode conventionally, we mobilized everyone at the company to create a free, complete analytical toolkit, Mode Studio. With Mode Studio we gave people who work with data every day the first tool of its kind: a tool that gives them the power to solve real problems, without having to rally financial or organizational resources to make it happen.
The response has been immense. Every day, analysts and data scientists sign up for Mode and use it to solve problems or answer questions in their organizations. Through that process, Mode becomes the go-to source for the most important information in the company, and grows to serve far more than the analysts and data scientists who are its primary users.
The success of a bottom-up approach like this is unique in this industry, and speaks to the changing role of the analytics practice. Analysts and data scientists need no longer be limited to the production of dashboards and reports. These individuals must be empowered to seek out and solve the most important challenges their teams face, and to improve the fundamental decision-making culture of their entire organization.
To further this vision of the empowered analyst, we have raised a $23 million Series C. Valor Equity Partners led the round, and Foundation Capital and REV Venture Partners, the leaders of Mode's Series A and Series B venture rounds, also participated. Jake Klamka, founder and CEO of Insight Data Science, and Tribe Capital participated as well. This round brings our total venture capital raised to $50 million. David Obrand, who led the round at Valor, will join our board of directors.
Our plan for this funding is to focus on supporting the people that use Mode most. The decision-making culture in an organization is as important to their success as the data and tools they use, and it's part of our job to help our customers cultivate that culture. To that end, we'll be hiring across multiple teams to build an even better experience for all Mode customers, including hiring in New York to expand support hours for our growing, global customer base.
As we've grown, so have our customers. Our 2019 product roadmap includes significant investment in features for managing large deployments, as well as improving the discoverability of the most important answers that customers find with Mode. We are going to double-down on making Mode the best analytics platform imaginable.
We believe in using our success for the good of the analytics community. Some of our proudest accomplishments at Mode have come from the work we've done in community-building, from SQL School to the Analytics Dispatch and beyond. So we'll also continue to invest in contributions to the analytics community at large.
From writing your first query, to analytics at a massive-scale, Mode will be the best platform for you and your team. This funding will help us deliver on that promise.
