Three years ago this month, Chartbeat launched at the web 2.0 summit. Today Chartbeat is beating under the hood of sites across 37 countries and takes the pulse of around 5 million visitors across the web at any one moment. Fantastic clients like ESPN, Fox News, The New York Times, Forbes, Fab.com, and Gilt Groupe have partnered with us and helped us to understand the contours of this new world of data.

Today, I’m excited to announce the next chapter in Chartbeat’s history: a new round of funding, new look, new dashboard, and a whole bunch of new features. That’s a lot to get through, but I promise to be brief.

A New Round and A New Partner

We’ve just closed a $9.5m Series B round of funding led by Josh Stein at Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Saul Klein at Index Ventures, and they’re joined by some of our favorite Angel investors.

Saul has been a constant friend and guide over the last three years and helped us take the time to find the right partner that will continuously help us push Chartbeat and the real-time revolution forward. We found that partner in Josh Stein. Josh took the time to get to know us over the course of a year, has incredible experience of building great SaaS companies like Box and SugarCRM. Most importantly, Josh just plain got it. Thanks Saul, thanks Josh, we’re going to make you proud.

A New Look

The first thing you’ll notice when you hit Chartbeat.com today is a very different look. We’re growing up. And growing up means making sure we’re as good looking on the outside as our dashboards are on the inside.

We’re also making things simpler. Newsbeat has become Chartbeat Publishing: the command center for all serious publishers of media and content.

A New Dashboard

We’re also rolling out a brand new dashboard with advanced functionality to all Chartbeat users over the next few days. When you get your hands on it, you’ll see a few key elements that we’ve focused on:

1. Real engagement

Common understandings of engagement have always relied upon explicit actions (a like or a share) taken by a few people or traditionally inaccurate guesstimetrics like “time-on-site.” At Chartbeat, we wanted to accurately understand how engaged each person who visits your site is, not just the people who hit the like button.

So we built Engaged Time. Window open in another tab? Doesn’t count. The visitor isn’t actively viewing, reading, commenting on the page? Doesn’t count. With Chartbeat’s unique way of measuring, Engaged Time counts the amount of time someone spends actively interacting with your site and enables you to see your site from a completely different perspective.

For the very first time, you can finally go beyond eyeballs and clicks and understand which content is making an impact, what’s engaging people’s heads and hearts.

2. Data in context

When you’re looking at your data – whether Chartbeat or otherwise – I bet the first question you ask yourself is “Is this good?”. You generally know if you’re doing well compared to yourself, but what about your competitors — those that are fighting for the same eyes and hearts that you are?

We’re introducing Peer Stats, which does just that.

Now, you can see your data, put in context with the anonymized, aggregated stats of your sites like yours all in real time.

Are we getting as much social traffic as we should? Is our page load speed fast enough? For the first time you’ll have a frame to understand your performance in the context of the wider web, so you know where to focus and when to celebrate.

3. Your data wherever you are

When something important happens, you want to know about it — whether it’s on your site, your iPhone or iPad app or across the social web. So why should you only see real-time stats of who’s on your site? You shouldn’t.

Chartbeat is going beyond the site. From now on you’ll be able to get real-time data from your iPhone or iPad app as well as your site. This feature is currently in beta so we’re going to need your feedback, but we’re super excited about it.

We’ve also launched a new Social View that brings the social data you need into one dashboard. You’ll get loads of insight into not just who’s talking about you where, but how that’s affecting your site traffic.

We hope you like all the new things we’ve been working on. The only thing we ask of you in return is your feedback. Let us know what you think about your new dashboard as you’re rolled into it over the next few days.

We can’t thank you enough for the love and support thus far. We’re excited to get to work and take this thing to an even higher level.