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"Dovetail is quietly building a product that will grow to be the next Figma, Datadog or Notion, and customer research will soon go from an emerging category to a global one," says Blackbird Ventures general partner Nick Crocker.
An Australian technology that can distil scattered documents and recordings into a meaningful database of consumer insights has been given a $5 million injection following a raise led by US venture capital firm Felicis Ventures.
Founded by ex-Atlassian employees Benjamin Humphrey and Bradley Ayers in 2017, Dovetail’s software has added 1,000 customers in the last 12 months alone, including the likes of Harvard University, IBM, Nielsen Norman Group, Boston Consulting Group and Wiley.
The latest round takes the Sydney outfit’s total capital raising to $9 million, with participation from Blackbird Ventures, Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes’ investment vehicle Grok Ventures, and Culture Amp co-founder Didier Elzinga.
Humphrey says the funding will help the company almost triple the size of its team.
"We always hear about the need for companies to house customer knowledge in a single place in order to build customer understanding, empathy, and drive customer-centric decision making,” says Humphrey, Dovetail’s CEO.
"This latest raise will give us a bit more cash to accelerate our team growth - we’re aiming to go from 40 to 110 people by the end of 2022.
“With a larger team, we’ll be able to release even more innovative features and products that enable organizations of all sizes to store, share, and collaborate on customer research data and insights.”
The company’s mantra is deep customer understanding, helping organisations make sense of all their customer research data in one intuitive, collaborative and searchable repository, with recording transcriptions, highlight reels and insights to boot.
It is a service that has helped Dovetail record 20 per cent month-over-month enterprise growth, attracting customers ranging from Cisco to Canva to Shopify to Square.
The company has also recently launched its new feature ‘stories’, giving users a new way to save, curate and remix research findings and various data sources to tell stories in a variety of ways.
The new feature also makes it possible for users to identify important themes across projects that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. Cross-project reports can be generated within minutes to dive into relevant learnings about a specific persona, feature set or product usability. This prevents prior research from living in silos or becoming “shelf ware” that decays over time.
"Deep customer insights are at the heart of every top-performing company. Before Dovetail, these insights were buried across teams and difficult to access in a centralised way to drive innovation,” says Felicis Ventures general partner and managing director Victoria Treyger.
“From day one, the Dovetail team focused on building the world’s most robust research platform that delivered unparalleled customer insights to teams and grew organically via a scalable, self-service model.
"As a result, Dovetail’s product led growth motion is driving a level of explosive customer adoption across mid-market and enterprise customers that is matched only by companies like Canva, Dropbox, and Atlassian. We are thrilled to partner with the Dovetail team to bring the power of customer insights to companies around the world."
Blackbird Ventures general partner Nick Crocker describes Dovetail as a “rare company” with a product-obsessed team, two founders who build, and sweat every detail, and a business that requires very little capital to scale.
"Seeing the calibre of companies that sign up from around the world every month having never spoken to a sales person is quite breathtaking," Crocker says.
The culture Benjamin and Brad have created is special, and the quality of people that are joining the team every week is amazing.
“Dovetail is quietly building a product that will grow to be the next Figma, Datadog or Notion, and customer research will soon go from an emerging category to a global one."
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