NetGenesis (NASDAQ: NTGX) was a web analytics software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A group of MIT students including 📝Rajat Bhargava and Matt Cutler founded it in 1994. Its software let companies collect, store, organize, and analyze detailed data on how customers and other visitors behaved on their websites, and it could combine that data with information from other online and offline systems. NetGenesis also sold professional services to help companies improve their online businesses.
📝Brad Feld and Will Herman were among the company's first backers, each investing $25,000 for a combined 20 percent stake; early board meetings took place around a table in an MIT classroom. Bhargava served as CEO and Cutler as president. NetGenesis went public on NASDAQ in February 2000, near the peak of the dot-com market. In December 2001 the analytics software maker SPSS completed its acquisition of NetGenesis in a stock deal valued at about $44 million, planning to fold NetGenesis's web analytics into its customer relationship management products. IBM acquired SPSS in 2009.
I met Raj when he was at MIT starting NetGenesis with Brad. When Raj started his next company, Sage Networks, which became 📝Interliant, he hired me as Director of M&A, my first job in the internet industry.