Tech
Chattermill helps Amazon and Uber understand customer feedback across social media and review sites. Check out the 14-slide pitch deck it used to raise a $26 million Series B.
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- London-based Chattermill has raised $26 million to analyze customer feedback for big firms.
- Its two cofounders are Russian, but the UK-based pair say the firm has never had an office in their homeland.
- We got an exclusive look at the 14-slide pitch deck it used to raise the fresh funds.
A startup helping companies collect and understand customer feedback from social media, review sites, and app stores has just secured $26 million in Series B financing.
London-based Chattermill uses artificial intelligence to collate customer feedback from internal sources, such as support tickets, and across the internet so companies have better understanding of their customer experience. It uses this data to identify pain points, which the company may then act on. The data is updated daily but customers can also receive alerts via email or Slack.
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Founded in 2015, cofounders Mikhail Dubov and Dmitry Isupov joined Entrepreneur First after seeing the “immense potential” in analysing publicly available feedback. Isupov had been working at a market research company, manually looking at customer feedback and brand perception.
“What he saw there was that data has immense potential in terms of insight, but it was incredibly expensive, difficult, and time consuming to to do anything about it because it was all done by humans,” said Dubov, Chattermill’s CEO.
Traditionally, companies would send out surveys or ask customers to rate them after ordering. “Most companies don’t do very much with that – at best, they hire an intern who maybe once a quarter would look through a sample of the data and try to pick out some kind of patterns. That essentially is a huge waste of opportunity because there is a lot of amazing insight in that data,” Dubov added.
If a customer changes a supplier and that affects the quality of the product, Chattermill can diagnose the issue and know which supplier the issue refers to because it can see what product people are complaining about.
Customers also don’t want to spend time answering lengthy surveys, he said, while the data itself is difficult to analyze at scale. The pair set about achieving the same result using machine learning. Today, they count the likes of Amazon, Uber, and H&M as customers. Chattermill is sector-agnostic, Dubov said, but they are particularly interested in ecommerce and retail, finance, and travel.
The current economic uncertainty strengthens Chattermill’s business case, Dubov said. Pressure on retaining existing customers is high as customer acquisition slows, and widespread layoffs mean companies have to figure out how to keep customers with fewer resources.
As well as scraping internet data, Chattermill plugs into SurveyMonkey, Typeform, and Qualtrics. It also “cleans” the data before analyzing it, accounting for things like different languages.
The round was led by London and Detroit-based venture firm Beringea, with participation from existing investors and new investor Blossom Street Ventures.
It came in two parts, Dubov said. He began thinking about it early this year but decided to do an internal bridge round, and closed the second tranche in summer.
Russia’s war in Ukraine has made the fundraising environment tough, Dubov added. Both he and his cofounder Dmitry Isupov are Russian, but have lived in London for around 20 years, and studied at Cambridge and Bristol respectively. Dubov has a Ukrainian flag by his name on his LinkedIn profile, and said the pair have few ties to Russia and that it wasn’t “a major part” of the conversation with investors.
Chattermill helped move its Russia contractors out of the country, he added, and worked to ensure its employees in Ukraine were safe. The firm has two contractors remaining in Russia who are currently trying to move, and never had a formal office or entity in the country. It is honoring some signed contracts with Russian customers, of which none are Kremlin-affiliated or on a sanctions list, Dubov said.
It currently has a team of 80 and would expect to be at 120 within the next 18 months, but Dubov said the company is being “extremely careful” with growth due to the wider economic uncertainty.
The cash will be used to double-down on existing markets of US and Europe.
Check out the 14-slide redacted pitch deck below.
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