SAN FRANCISCO & SYDNEY--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dovetail, the leading customer research platform, today announces it has closed $63 million USD in Series A financing led by Accel, with participation from existing investors including Blackbird and Felicis Ventures, at a post-money valuation north of $700 million USD. This brings Dovetail’s total funding to $71 million USD since the company was started in 2017. The new capital will support Dovetail’s continued investment in building the system of record for an organization’s customer knowledge. Dovetail’s 2,600+ customers include many of the world’s most innovative companies including Affirm, Arm, Atlassian, Canva, Deloitte, PwC, Porsche, Shopify, Starbucks, and Workday.
Dovetail, which has pioneered the research repository category, brings teams together to discover customer insights from data ranging from user interview recordings to satisfaction survey responses. The platform enables teams to collaborate on customer research and make better decisions, faster with rapid access to relevant customer insights.
Organizations around the world are doubling down on user experience and customer-centricity as strategic amplifiers of growth. Along with the rising demand for collaboration tools, these trends have seen customers of all sizes—most notably, 10% of Fortune 100 companies like Cisco, Comcast, Intel, and Merck—look to Dovetail for their customer research needs.
“I’m proud to say Dovetail is becoming a must-have for many organizations. Through the insights created on our platform, teams can quickly make good decisions based on everything they know about their customers,” said Benjamin Humphrey, Co-founder and CEO of Dovetail. “However, we have only scratched the surface. There are many more opportunities to serve unmet needs in this space. With Accel’s partnership and this new capital, I’m excited to continue growing our team to build new functionality and launch new products.”
“Dovetail is quickly becoming the formative system of record for customer research, in the same way Atlassian did for developers,” said Rich Wong, Partner at Accel. “We’re excited to support the journey.”
“With its slick UI and powerful collaboration features, Dovetail is extending user research to the entire organization and redefining how companies manage their product and customer experience,” said Arun Mathew, Partner at Accel. “Benjamin and Bradley have built a strong team in a flourishing region, and we are thrilled to support this next step.”
“In just two years since we invested in Dovetail, Benjamin and Bradley defined the vision for the customer insights repository category and executed on that vision with unmatched precision,” said Victoria Treyger, general partner at Felicis. “The company grew revenue 8x, built a recruiting machine that raised the bar with every new hire, and developed the superpower to rapidly iterate in every area of the business, from robust product releases to innovating on the product-led growth model to acquire enterprise customers. We are incredibly proud to be part of the Dovetail rocket ship.”
Blackbird Ventures partner Nick Crocker first invested in Dovetail when the team was just three people and has watched Dovetail become one of the fastest growing startups in Australia. “If Dovetail continues on its current customer and revenue growth trajectory, it can achieve Atlassian scale success. The velocity of product development, caliber of talent and customer obsession, is stunning to watch. We’re thrilled to be partnered with Dovetail on their journey,” said Crocker.
The proliferation of cloud apps and the rise of product-led growth has enabled teams to access more customer data than ever before, but has consequently made it difficult to gain insights given the variety of formats and fragmentation. Dovetail is the only cross-functional solution (used by product, research, engineering, and design teams alike) that affords the analysis of multiple formats and centralizes insights across an organization’s tool stack. Further, as demand for customer insights continues to outstrip the capacity of internal research teams, Dovetail provides a platform for ‘democratizing’ the research process, enabling non-researchers and researchers to collaborate in a cross-functional manner.
Dovetail’s customers use the platform’s data analysis, insight reporting, and search capabilities to enable everything from product development to digital transformation. “Dovetail brings everything into one place. Everyone in the product team can easily go in and view research. It makes everything less chaotic, more organized, and the research team less stressed,” said Becky White, Lead Design Researcher at Canva. “Product teams can analyze in whichever way is best for them and their study. When they start to see those emerging themes and insights from the data: that’s the real power of Dovetail.”
Key milestones over the past 12 months include growing revenue by nearly 3x with 20% growth in enterprise month-over-month; tripling headcount from 20 to 65 people; launching new reporting and data discovery features, and a participant management tool; gaining SOC 2 certification; opening a San Francisco hub; and launching integrations with Zoom, Google Drive, and Slack, along with an upcoming Atlassian integration for users to weave customer insights into their existing workflows, tools, and processes.
Dovetail’s vision is to be the system of record for all of an organization’s qualitative and quantitative customer data and insights, enabling every team to access relevant knowledge about their customers in seconds. Going forward, the company will build on its core platform and expand its product lineup, launching new products that meet the complex needs of teams beyond product, including marketing, sales, customer success, and support.
In addition to Accel, the Series A included existing investors Blackbird, Felicis Ventures, Grok Ventures, and Didier Elzinga (CEO of Culture Amp), along with new investors Stewart Butterfield (CEO of Slack), Vlad Magdalin (CEO of Webflow), and Daniel Yanisse (CEO of Checkr).
About Dovetail
Dovetail’s mission is to enable the world to create better products and services through deep customer understanding. We empower 45,000+ people, from agencies to universities to Fortune 100 companies, to make sense of their customer research in one collaborative and powerful research platform. Founded in 2017 by Benjamin Humphrey and Bradley Ayers, Dovetail has 65+ employees across offices in Sydney and San Francisco. For more, visit dovetailapp.com.
About Accel
Accel is a global venture capital firm that is the first partner to exceptional teams everywhere, from inception through all phases of private company growth. Atlassian, Bumble, CrowdStrike, DJI, Facebook, Fiverr, Flipkart, Freshworks, Qualtrics, Slack, Spotify, Squarespace, Tenable, and UiPath are among the companies Accel has backed over the past 35+ years. We help ambitious entrepreneurs build iconic global businesses. For more, visit accel.com or twitter.com/accel.
