AN Edinburgh start-up which helps businesses gain insight from customer support conversation data has secured seed funding of £115,000.
Prodsight, which was established by Tadas Labudis, will use the cash to hire key staff over the next 12 months to improve its product and grow the customer base.
The Royal Society of Edinburgh invested £45,000 in the firm and a pre-seed round raised a further £70,000.
Investors included a number of prominent Scottish angel investors such as Alistair Forbes, Rob Dobson, Judy Wilson and Andrew Barrie.
More than half of the Seed Haus tech incubator partners have invested in the company including Robin Knox and Paul Walton formerly of Intelligent Point of Sale.
Knox said: “I was really excited to hear about Prodsight. I know a customer centric mindset is essential but as a company scales, there is very often a customer disconnect.
“At first you are talking with customers constantly and very close to feedback. In time as more management layers emerge, you can lose touch with your customers... I believe in the product so much that I am using Prodsight in my new business venture.”
Lithuanian-born Labudis has been an entrepreneur since the age of 18, founding two start-ups while at the University of Glasgow.
After graduating, he worked as product manager at leading mobile app agency Kotikan and a messaging start-up Yavi. While in these roles he realised that customer feedback analysis was essential to businesses but tricky and time-consuming, which gave him the idea to launch Prodsight.
Taking conversational data from live chat such as Intercom, the company uses its unique software and artificial intelligence (AI) to turn information into summarised insights about customer needs.
This allows data-driven decisions to be made quickly and efficiently, helping product teams to rapidly identify problems, education issues and prioritise fixes and improvements. This reduces support costs and helps companies stay lean.
Based in Edinburgh’s CodeBase, the firm has had a global customer base from day one with 95% of clients coming from outside the UK. It is also one of 40 start-ups participating in the Unlocking Ambition challenge fund launched by Nicola Sturgeon.
Phil Hayes from Eventree, one of its customers, said: “Issues which caused the most friction for users immediately bubbled to the top in the Prodsight reporting. Every month we identify the top three product issues with Prodsight and put these changes into our next development sprint.”
Labudis, Prodsight’s CEO
and founder, added: “The customer feedback analysis space is still a relatively young market but it is growing and the opportunities
are huge – there are currently
some 1.5 million companies across the world using live chat functionality and generating billions of customer conversations.”
Why are you making commenting on The National only available to subscribers?
We know there are thousands of National readers who want to debate, argue and go back and forth in the comments section of our stories. We’ve got the most informed readers in Scotland, asking each other the big questions about the future of our country.
Unfortunately, though, these important debates are being spoiled by a vocal minority of trolls who aren’t really interested in the issues, try to derail the conversations, register under fake names, and post vile abuse.
So that’s why we’ve decided to make the ability to comment only available to our paying subscribers. That way, all the trolls who post abuse on our website will have to pay if they want to join the debate – and risk a permanent ban from the account that they subscribe with.
The conversation will go back to what it should be about – people who care passionately about the issues, but disagree constructively on what we should do about them. Let’s get that debate started!
Callum Baird, Editor of The National
Comments: Our rules
We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.
Please report any comments that break our rules.
Read the rules hereLast Updated:
Report this comment Cancel