PALO ALTO, Calif., Feb. 10, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Birdie, the AI-powered SaaS platform that delivers actionable insights for product lifecycle management and optimization, today announced it has raised $7 million in new seed round funding led by SoftBank Latin America Fund and Illuminate Ventures, with additional participation from Fusion Fund, Astella and Endeavor Catalyst.
As part of today’s funding Marco Camhaji, managing partner of early-stage investments at SoftBank Latin America Fund, and Cindy Padnos, Founder and Managing Partner, Illuminate Ventures will both join the Birdie Board of Directors, which currently includes Birdie Co-Founders Alexandre Hadade (CEO) and Patrícia Osorio (CRO).
Birdie plans to use the new funding to significantly expand their team and accelerate growth. By the end of 2022, Birdie plans to grow its coverage area to 15 countries and deliver new capabilities to help product teams at consumer-facing brands design and launch successful products based on accurate and spontaneous user opinions.
Driven by the company's AI-powered platform, Birdie captures and analyzes consumer opinions from multiple data sources to, with proprietary metrics and algorithms, remove the noise and uncover insights that support decision-making across the different product lifecycle stages. As a result, product teams can identify and monitor changes, trends, and problems with up to 40% more agility, making it easier to prioritize features and measure the impact of actions.
The company is headquartered in Silicon Valley and serves its customers in USA, Brazil, UK, Mexico, Spain, and Germany. In 2022 the company plans to expand to Japan, China, Italy, France, India, and Russia. Birdie already has a 100% remote operational structure with people in Europe, the United States, and 13 Brazilian states and serves some of the leading companies in the world, such as Microsoft, HP, Midea, and Jetson.
For example, data from Birdie has already affected the lifecycle strategy of Jetson products that are used daily by millions of consumers, with undisputable data that led to critical changes in launch strategies, feature prioritization, and manufacturing, and in some cases with 40% more efficiency.
"Before Birdie, we felt like we were always one step behind in understanding our customers, as we had to rely on market research data and surveys. We now can monitor the pulse of the customer and act on the changes as they happen. It’s like watching a movie instead of seeing a picture,” said Guilherme Koga, Sr. Director of Business Intelligence of Jetson, manufacturer of the best-selling electric scooters.
Birdie distinguishes itself by processing unstructured opinions from an array of different sources with high accuracy and granularity, combining the benefits of qualitative and quantitative data analysis methods with state-of-the-art technology. The platform also generates automatic rankings showcasing strengths, weaknesses, jobs-to-be-done, critical issues, and features with higher impact in customer satisfaction for each product and segment - becoming a strategic cockpit for Product Managers.
Birdie already monitors more than 150 data sources including online retailers, app stores, discussion forums, and private customer experience systems such as call centers, satisfaction surveys, and social listening platforms, and has plans to increase this number by 3x over the next year.
“We want to thank SoftBank Latin America Fund, Illuminate Ventures, Fusion Fund, Astella, and Endeavor Catalyst for their support of Birdie, as we look to scale our company further and to provide greater support to product managers and marketers at consumer-facing brands and retailers alike," said Hadade. “Birdie is meeting its vision of disrupting market research by helping companies stay on top of their products' lifecycle performance with access to real-time, actionable insights and consumer opinions thanks to our patent-pending AI-powered platform. Having greater control for a brand’s product life cycle is vital to the success of any product manager - and we’re giving that power to PMs from physical products’ companies.”
“We are bullish on our new investment in Birdie and glad to support Brazilian entrepreneurs creating a global company. We were impressed with Birdie’s capacity to gather large volumes of data and transform them into actionable insights for corporations to develop meaningful products for their consumers. Birdie’s insights also allow companies to track the performance of their own products and compare them to the competition, highlighting the features that drive customer satisfaction. The capacity to provide up-to-date and actionable insights is key to support product development in a disruptive manner,” said Camhaji.
“We found Birdie’s value proposition to be particularly compelling. They sit at the intersection of product/customer intelligence, and the unremitting increase in competition faced by global brands. We’re delighted to back a company led by such a visionary team that is leveraging their unique know-how and deep technical capabilities to address a clear market need,” said Padnos.
About Birdie
Birdie is a pioneering SaaS platform that generates insights for product development and optimization. The company, which uses AI and NLP to process consumer opinions from different public and private data sources, generates automatic insights to support strategic decisions along the product lifecycle to maximize competitive advantage.
Founded in 2018 by Alexandre Hadade, Patrícia Osorio, Everton Cherman, and Rodrigo Pantigas, Birdie is headquartered in Palo Alto with offices in Miami and São Paulo and is backed by Softbank, Illuminate Ventures, Fusion Fund, Astella, Endeavor Catalyst, and private investors. For more information, visit Birdie.ai or follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
About SoftBank Group
The SoftBank Group invests in breakthrough technology to improve the quality of life for people around the world. The SoftBank Group is composed of SoftBank Group Corp. (TOKYO: 9984), an investment holding company that includes stakes in telecommunications, internet services, AI, smart robotics, IoT, and clean energy technology providers; the SoftBank Vision Funds, which are investing more than US$135 billion to help extraordinary entrepreneurs transform industries and shape new ones; the US$5 billion SoftBank Latin America Fund, the largest venture fund in that region; the newly-launched US$3 billion SoftBank Latin America Fund II; and the SB Opportunity Fund, a US$100 million fund dedicated to investing in enterprises founded by entrepreneurs of color in the U.S. To learn more, please visit https://group.softbank/en.
About Illuminate Ventures
Founded in 2010, Illuminate Ventures invests in innovative companies led by visionary teams in the B2B/Enterprise software space. Illuminate provides the first institutional capital designed to help accelerate initial market traction. Illuminate portfolio companies frequently bring together diverse perspectives that marry “creative destruction” with new technologies to solve old problems in new ways. With investments in dozens of startups, the firm has gained significant realizations from IPOs (XTLY and CPNG) and many strategic M&A exits. To learn more about the Illuminate portfolio and perspective, visit https://illuminate.com and follow @IlluminateVC.
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