Helium Ventures, a San Francisco company that buys and runs software businesses, announced on October 13, 2026 that it had acquired Jitsu, a New York startup that makes an open-source customer data platform often pitched as an alternative to Segment.
The companies did not disclose financial terms or say exactly when the deal closed. The announcement made clear it had happened some months earlier: it said Jitsu had shipped more features since the acquisition, including a July release, and Jitsu's Y Combinator profile already lists the company as acquired by Helium Ventures.
Jitsu stays MIT-licensed and free to self-host with no usage limits, and existing Jitsu Cloud plans and prices are unchanged. Co-founder and chief executive Vladimir Klimontovich will continue to advise the business.
What Jitsu built
Jitsu collects event data, such as page views, clicks and sign-ups, from websites, mobile apps and servers, and streams it to a company's own data warehouse and to other business tools. Supported destinations include ClickHouse, BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift and Postgres, along with dozens of software-as-a-service products.
Jitsu's GitHub page argues that it loads warehouses faster than Segment, in batches as often as once a minute or row by row, and that Jitsu Cloud charges by event volume rather than by tracked user. Because the whole pipeline can run on a customer's own infrastructure, the data never has to pass through a third party.
Jitsu Cloud has a free tier of 200,000 active events a month. The Business plan costs $99 a month with 2 million events included and $40 for each additional million, and Enterprise plans are priced individually. The company has also added reverse ETL, which pushes warehouse data back into business tools, and a managed ClickHouse warehouse.
“We built Jitsu to give data teams control over their customer data and the freedom to run it on their own terms.”
The founders and the funding
Jitsu was founded in 2020 by Peter Wysinski and Vladimir Klimontovich, both former chief technology officers. Klimontovich was previously co-founder and chief operating officer of GetIntent, an advertising technology company. The startup went through Y Combinator's Summer 2020 batch.
In December 2020 it raised a $2 million seed round led by Costanoa Ventures, with Y Combinator, The House Fund and SignalFire participating. Tony Liu of Costanoa said at the time that both founders had already solved the problem of ingesting large volumes of event data with low latency at earlier companies. No later funding round has been reported.
Jitsu stayed small. Its Y Combinator profile lists a team of four people, based in New York.
Who Helium Ventures is
Helium Ventures was founded by Rohit Mittal and Priyank Singh, who previously co-founded Stilt, a Y Combinator-backed lender to immigrants whose lending platform was sold to JG Wentworth. The company describes itself as an AI-native holding company that acquires and stewards software businesses.
Jitsu joins a portfolio that includes InsurGrid, an insurance data platform that Helium bought in January 2026 and which serves more than 2,500 property and casualty agents, as well as Maroo, a business management and payments platform for creative and event businesses, and That's The One, a planning tool for wedding and event professionals.
When it bought InsurGrid, Mittal said Helium looks for business software with proven product-market fit in large, underserved markets, and that it invests in product development and team growth after a deal. Mittal said Helium's focus at Jitsu is on keeping events flowing, connecting more tools and fixing problems quickly.
What has changed for users
Under Helium, Jitsu's July release, version 2.14, gave self-hosting teams a Kubernetes operator, dedicated function servers and Kubernetes-native sync scheduling, so different workloads can scale separately. It also added audit logs, expiring API tokens, a maintenance mode and the ability to reprocess events after failed deliveries.
New destinations include Resend, SendGrid, Statsig, DuckDB and MotherDuck, and Xero, along with more authentication options for Snowflake and Postgres. Developers and AI agents can configure and debug pipelines through Jitsu's management API, command-line tool and MCP server.
Customers do not need to take any action as a result of the acquisition, according to the announcement, which also promised faster support and more integrations aimed at agencies and technology partners that connect client systems through Jitsu.
