App analytics startup Pyze Inc. has emerged from stealth planning to give away free the analytics that competitors like Mixpanel and Localytics are charging for.

Pyze’s founders said its analytics product, which it describes as “a data scientist in a box for all mobile app publishers,” will level the playing field for publishers who cannot afford high-price analytics products available from existing vendors. The company has raised a $1.7 million seed round led by John Chisholm Ventures and DoubleRock.

Basic app analysis metrics such as installs and daily active users have become a commodity product, and are even provided free by companies such as Flurry, Pyze’s co-founders Dickey Singh and Prabhjot Singh said.

“If you look at the market for people who can actually pay [for app analytics], it’s very, very small,” said Fred Dotzler, managing director at Denovo Ventures, which also invested in the round. “It makes sense to offer these services for free, and we really see a very large addressable market.”

The company’s analytics product, Pyze Growth Intelligence, helps companies correlate data from multiple sources using machine-learning algorithms to draw insights from the data. Pyze plans to monetize by offering premium features for paying customers. From its launch, Pyze Growth Intelligence will include a few enterprise features, including back-end API access to the raw data and 24/7 customer support.

Pyze’s founders point to the belt-tightening at several paid analytics services over the past few months as a sign that the price of such services is falling. In January Mixpanel laid off 18 employees, primarily in sales. Localytics laid off 37 employees the same month. Optimizely laid off 40 in March. The layoffs have brought Pyze more resumes from alumni of those companies, the founders said.

The Redwood City, Calif., company plans to raise a Series A round of $7 million to $10 million this fall, and then raise a Series B by the end of 2017.

Pyze will be reaching out to app publishers, including those that currently pay for analytics, the company’s founders said. Poaching clients is the norm in app analytics Angel investors Jim Wilson, Dr. Narinder Kapany, Gerry Ohrstrom, Trenchant Capital Management founder Tyson Strauser and other angels invested in the round. The round closed in early March. Before the new round, Pyze had raised $1.7 million in seed and angel funding. John Chisholm of John Chisholm Ventures, another co-founder of the company, sits on Pyze’s board.

Write to Patience Haggin at patience.haggin@wsj.com. Follow her on Twitter at @patiencehaggin

Corrections & Amplifications:

This article has been updated to correct that Pyze’s amount and stage of funding is a $1.7 million seed investment as well as Tyson Strauser’s affiliation as Trenchant Capital Management founder. A previous version of this article stated Pyze raised a $9 million Series A round and that Mr. Strauser was affiliated with Samlyn Capital.

Source WSJ