Dovetail raises $5M to help organizations innovate faster

Sydney, Australia—Dovetail, a software company that enables teams to make better decisions through deep customer understanding, today announced that it has raised $5 million AUD to further scale the reach of its customer research platform. The round was led by Felicis Ventures, with participation from Blackbird Ventures, Grok Ventures, and Didier Elzinga, CEO of Culture Amp. The company has created a collaborative, easily searchable repository for all of an organization’s customer research to fully inform and expedite product decisions; users can share data-backed insights across the broader business in real time.

Funding comes as Dovetail has generated remarkable customer growth over the past year. The company has added over 1,000 customers in just 12 months, including Datadog, GitLab, Harvard University, IBM, Nielsen Norman Group, and Wiley, to an impressive global customer base that includes Boston Consulting Group, Canva, Cisco, Deloitte, Maersk, Shopify, Square, VMware and more. Enterprise growth, in particular, has topped 20 percent month-over-month as subscriptions continue to climb.

Closing the customer understanding gap

As organizations grow, a customer understanding gap develops between those who are exposed to customers regularly (i.e. user researchers, product managers, designers, sales team members, and support) and those who aren’t. Dovetail was created to close this gap by democratizing data so that everyone in an organization has relevant knowledge at their fingertips. This type of access to information facilitates faster, better decisions and empathy with customers that generate better products and services.

“Our customers repeatedly tell us that there’s been no source of truth for research data and customer insights across their organizations. This is really frustrating for them because it creates massive inefficiencies and unnecessary disconnects,” said Dovetail CEO and co-founder Benjamin Humphrey. “To solve the problem, we’re building a home for customer knowledge that is a single, searchable repository for discovery, curation, and sharing of data and insights in a secure and privacy-conscious way. This will enable all organizations to build a customer-centric culture that will fundamentally improve the products and services brought to market.”

Read more about the customer understanding gap →

Create and share research reports with evidence

As part of Dovetail’s commitment to ongoing product innovation, the company also unveiled its latest feature, Stories. Dovetail users now have an entirely new way to save, curate, and remix research findings and various data sources within the Dovetail platform. In a simple, self-service search, users can pull insights, video highlights, tags, interviews, or entire projects from anywhere in Dovetail, incorporating them into a story. Once added, it’s easy to organize content with a drag and drop editor so that users can tell a compelling story around their findings and insights. Users can also add colored sticky notes, headings, and text to make stories visually appealing, as well as customizable reference cards, embedded files and images, an integration with Unsplash, and more.

Stories also makes it possible to identify important themes across projects that might otherwise go 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.

Driving remarkable customer growth with a self-service model

“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 centralized way to drive innovation,” said Victoria Treyger, general partner and managing director at Felicis Ventures. “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.”

Stories is just one of Dovetail’s recent updates. Others include greater customization options, particularly for admins who control the user experience. On top of its successful Zoom integration, Dovetail has now added an integration with Google Drive. Additionally, Dovetail has incorporated three new features to its People add-on to enable tracking of research participants in a privacy-conscious way. On top of this, new security features and organization processes like single sign-on, remote session log out, and SOC 2 audit are part of the platform. With the latest round of funding, the Dovetail team will be able to take its capabilities even further to meet the evolving demands of modern organizations.