Birdie Closes $7M Funding Round Led by SoftBank and Illuminate Ventures

The AI-powered SaaS platform Birdie has announced that it raised $7 million in a new funding round led by SoftBank Latin America Fund and Illuminate Ventures, with additional participants including Fusion Fund, Astella and Endeavor Catalyst. Birdie’s platform provides deep insights into product lifecycle management and optimization. 

Expanding Team and Accelerating Growth

According to the company, it will use the new funding to expand its team and accelerate growth. Birdie’s leadership plans to expand its coverage area to 15 countries by 2022, as well as deliver new capabilities to help product teams design and launch new products based on user opinions. 

Birdie relies on its AI-powered platform to capture and analyze consumer opinions, which are pulled from multiple data sources. Through the use of proprietary metrics and algorithms, the platform can remove noise and uncover insights that aid the decision-making process across product life cycle stages. All of this has enabled product teams to identify changes, trends, and problems with up to 40% more agility. 

With its headquarters in SIlicon Valley, the company also has customers in the US, Brazil, Mexico, UK, Spain, and Germany. The company’s new expansion plans include China, Japan, France, India, and Russia. 

There are many top companies that rely on Birdie throughout the globe, such as Microsoft, HP, Jetson, and Midea. 

In the case of Jetson, the company has used data from Birdie to adjust the lifecycle strategy of their products, which are used by millions of people each day. These initiatives led to new launch strategies, feature prioritization, and even 40% more efficiency in some cases. 

Guilherme Koga is Senior Director of Business Intelligence of Jetson. 

“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 Koga.

Processing Unstructured Opinions 

Birdie’s platform works by processing unstructured opinions pulled from a variety of sources, and it does so with high accuracy. It achieves this by combining qualitative and quantitative data analysis methods with AI technology. Birdie can also generate automatic rankings to show strengths, weaknesses, critical issues, and more. 

The platform monitors over 150 data sources such as online retailers, discussion forums, social listening platforms, and more. They plan on expanding this 3x within the next year. 

Alexandre Hadade is CEO and Co-Founder of Birdie. 

“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.”

Marco Camhaji is managing partner of early-stage investments at SoftBank Latin America Fund.

“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.

Cindy Padnos is Founder and Managing Partner at Illuminate Ventures. 

“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. 

Camhaji and Padnos will both join the Birdie Board of Directors.