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.”