San Antonio—Ben Kuhn has been promoted to become the CEO of Keen, a San Antonio startup that helps software developers with custom application programming interfaces for data collection and analytics.
Kuhn was hired as the general manager of Keen in 2018, having previously worked at healthcare companies DaVita and Genentech. Most recently, he co-founded another software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup in San Antonio, Luka Health, which he left for Keen.
Keen is owned by Scaleworks, an investment firm that acquires SaaS businesses that may be under performing, then invests in them to boost revenue. It acquired Keen in late 2017. Founded in 2016, Scaleworks announced in February that it had raised an $80 million fund to acquire more startups. That was the firm’s second fund, following $60 million raised in 2017.
More than 75,000 analytics projects have been created with Keen, Kuhn said in a blog post released today. That includes work for companies like San Francisco-based Pixlee, a marketing software maker that uses Keen to present return-on-investment metrics for user-generated content, Kuhn wrote. It also includes Newport, RI-based Groove, which sells help desk software. Grove’s customers want to measure how help desk teams are performing, and Keen helps the company show that, Kuhn wrote.
Building custom analytics tools is time consuming and costly, and Keen is targeting small-to-midsize SaaS businesses. The company’s revenue increased 50 percent in 2018 over the previous year, according to Kuhn. Scaleworks doesn’t release revenue numbers, but looks for businesses with at least $4 million in annual recurring revenue. Keen doubled its employee count to 19 last year, and is hiring.
