Jan 19 (Reuters) - Australian customer analytics startup Dovetail has raised $63 million in a Series A funding round led by U.S. venture capital firm Accel, the company announced on Wednesday.

The fundraising valued Dovetail at over $700 million (A$970 million) and has put the five-year-old firm among the ranks of Australia's most valuable homegrown tech startups.

The company plans to use the fresh capital to invest in its product suites and grow its presence in the U.S. market, which accounts for the majority of its customer base.

Founded by Benjamin Humphrey and Bradley Ayers, two former colleagues at Australian software giant Atlassian, Dovetail's platform helps companies gather and understand customer insights by analyzing and storing unstructured customer research data such as transcripts. The company said it serves over 2600 enterprise customers including Starbucks, Deloitte, and Porsche.

"We're going to be this mission-critical database for every organization, which contains all that they know about their customers across different tools in their stack,” chief executive Benjamin Humphrey said in an interview.

Dovetail was first bootstrapped for 18 months before raising $6.5 million (A$9 million) in two seed rounds, counting Felicis Ventures and Blackbird Ventures as its early backers. Humphrey said the firm has tripled its revenue in the past twelve months and is “almost profitable”.

Dovetail currently employs 65 people and plans to add 100 employees in the next 12 months in offices including San Francisco and Sydney.

Over the past decade, Australia has emerged as an attractive destination for venture capital investment in tech startups. Canva, a Sydney-based online design and publishing platform, was valued at $40 billion in a fundraising last year. (Reporting by Krystal Hu in New York;Editing by Elaine Hardcastle)