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Sturdy.ai CEO Steve Hazelton. (Sturdy.ai Photo)
Portland-based Sturdy.ai, a startup whose platform uses AI to analyze customer communications across multiple channels to help minimize churn, raised $6 million in a seed funding round led by Seattle-based firm Voyager, the company announced Tuesday.
What sturdy does: Sturdy analyzes emails, support tickets, calls, and other unstructured customer conversations to identify patterns, behaviors, and signals that lead to churn, expansion, or inefficiency.
Unlike tools that rely on analyzing telemetry data, manual tagging, or health scores, Sturdy autonomously surfaces proactive signals, giving teams a head start on protecting revenue and growing accounts. To get the data, Sturdy built integrations with 12 common customer-facing systems including Gmail, Outlook, Salesforce, Hubspot, Zendesk, ServiceNow, Gong, Zoom, Jira, and more. etc. See here for further explanation about the tech.
Use case: One example of how a customer uses the product, as it relates to increased retention, is Syntrio, a B2B software company that identified a segment of customers expressing similar integration frustrations and response lags from the account management team. Sturdy triggered alerts and automated workflows that allowed leadership to intervene and save $1.2 million in at-risk renewals.
Quotable: “We’re creating an AI-first intelligent interface for all things customer. This allows Sturdy to provide an almost magical understanding of every customer interaction across every data silo,” co-founder and CEO Steve Hazelton said in a statement. “This funding enables us to move faster to empower teams to stay ahead of risk and unlock new revenue opportunities.”
Founders: Co-founders include Steve Hazelton, CTO Nathaniel Hazelton and chief revenue officer Joel Passen. All three spent time together at Newton Software, and Passen and Steve Hazelton worked together at Gravity Technologies and Paycor.
Revenue: The company said it is approaching $1 million in annual recurring revenue.
Headcount: Sturdy employs 15 U.S.-based employees, and it’s hiring in sales, engineering, product, and data sciences.
Investors in the round: Fortson VC joined Voyager in the round, along with existing investor Grotech Ventures. Voyager General Partner Diane Fraiman is joining Sturdy’s board.
