In its latest early-stage funding round in Latin America, SoftBank has announced a $7 million seed investment in Birdie, a consumer intelligence firm founded by Brazilian entrepreneurs Alexandre Hadade, Patrícia Osorio, Everton Cherman, and Rodrigo Pantigas.
The round, co-led by Illuminate Ventures, was also joined by Fusion Fund, Astella and Endeavor Catalyst. Following the investment, Marco Camhaji, managing partner of early-stage investments at SoftBank Latin America Fund, and Cindy Padnos, founder and managing partner at Illuminate Ventures will both join the startup’s board.
The new cash will go towards a “significant” workforce boost and an international expansion plan, which will see the Palo Alto-based company broadening its footprint to 15 markets by year-end.
Delivering actionable insights
Birdie describes itself as a “strategic cockpit for product managers”. Its software-as-a-service offering processes unstructured consumer opinions from a set of more than 150 disparate data sources such as app stores and private customer experience channels such as call centers. It combines qualitative and quantitative data analysis methods with artificial intelligence and natural language processing (NLP).
The product generates automatic rankings showcasing strengths, weaknesses, jobs-to-be-done, critical issues, and features with higher impact in customer satisfaction for each product and segment. The end result is insights aimed at supporting decision-making and prioritization across the different product lifecycle stages.
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“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 project managers from physical products’ companies,” said Birdie’s co-founder Alexandre Hadade.
According to SoftBank’s Camhaji, the megafund is “bullish” on its new investment in Birdie. “We are glad to support Brazilian entrepreneurs creating a global company”, he noted, adding the team was “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,” the investor added.
The team at Illuminate found Birdie’s value proposition to be “particularly compelling.” “They sit at the intersection of product/customer intelligence, and the ongoing 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,” Padnos added.
