Why we raised $4M and what we’re planning for 2020

Since 2017, Dovetail has grown to an 11 person team with hundreds of customers worldwide, all with no external investment and no sales or paid marketing. Now, we’ve raised a $4M seed round led by Blackbird Ventures, with participation from Felicis Ventures, and Culture Amp’s CEO and co-founder, Didier Elzinga.

This investment will help us rapidly grow our team, learn from a new network of advisors and founders, and execute on our mission to revolutionize how researchers, designers, and product managers do user research within organizations worldwide.

The best product for researchers

Making sense of unstructured research data—like interview transcripts, usability testing notes, and survey responses—is a practical problem that all researchers face, but it has a reputation for being inefficient and complicated.

Throughout 2020, we’ll build on existing features like highlighting, segmentation, tag management, boards, and charts. Expect to see plenty of improvements to the analysis workflow and overall experience.

We’ll also introduce new experiences to evolve Dovetail into a world-class data analysis platform, including game-changing features for video, audio, and images, new ways to speed up analysis through automation, and better segmentation and charts to help you uncover patterns across your research data.

Your customer knowledge base

Imagine a collective brain for your organization’s customer knowledge: a centralized, searchable database of research and insights that the entire company leverages to make better decisions. Anyone in the organization can effortlessly uncover user research insights and explore the evidence, and the context, that led to them.

Everyone’s talking about the need for a research repository. Several companies have built their own solutions internally including Uber’s Kaleidoscope, WeWork’s Polaris, and Microsoft’s Human Insights Library. However, there isn’t an option that’s accessible to organizations that don’t have the resources to build their own.

Dovetail will be the obvious choice for your organization’s research and insights. This year, we’ll invest heavily in ways to import data, collaboration features to get everyone involved, and security and privacy to ensure your research is always safe and compliant.

Everyone does research

Almost all teams within an organization conduct some form of customer research, even if they don’t explicitly call it that. Product managers interview users, designers test prototypes, salespeople talk to leads, support staff track topics, marketing facilitates focus groups, HR run feedback surveys. These teams all do it differently, often publishing mountains of data, reports, and updates across a variety of tools.

Organizations are also competing more on customer experience as user expectations increase. We believe that understanding customers is critical to delivering a great experience, so this year, Dovetail will empower everyone to be a researcher

A world-class company

The opportunity is huge. We’re building a stellar team of engineers, designers, researchers, marketers, and creatives to revolutionize user research for organizations worldwide. If you want to work on a challenging product, with a diverse customer base, amazing investors, and a fun culture, please look at our open roles.

A big thank you from us

Lastly, we want to say thank you to every one of our users. Your continued support is the reason we are where we are now. Thank you to everyone who has provided us feedback on the product and shaped its development – we couldn’t have done it without you, and we look forward to collaborating with you even more in the future.

Talk soon!