The success of any product is directly related to its quality. Many people will abandon a product that isn't working well or looks great, regardless of how cool it may seem.
UnitQ, a Burlingame-based startup that uses data-driven approaches to product quality, announced today it had raised $30 million in a Series B round of funding led by Accel. Christian Wiklund, co-founder of UnitQ, explains that the company uses artificial intelligence in order to assist businesses with determining what factors are affecting product quality.
Although he wouldn't disclose the valuation or revenue figures, unitQ's CEO stated that it has tripled its annual recurring revenue (ARR) each year.
SaaS companies aim to provide engineering, product ops, and product management teams with the tools to spot and fix quality problems that could be affecting customer satisfaction and retention.
unitQ claims that it can identify actionable insights in many ways. It gathers feedback from users through public sources, such as app reviews, social media, and private sources, like support tickets, chats, and surveys. It also uses its own API to connect to external data sources. The company currently integrates with 26 platforms, pulls insights from them, and also ingests data from any user feedback.
Wiklund stated that unitQ automatically tags and analyses quality issues based on all the data points. This goal is to provide the best and most complete view of product quality.
Although the startup is primarily focused on consumer businesses, it also has B2B clients. Some of the customers include Pandora, Chime, Pandora and NerdWallet.
Wiklund stated that their goal is not to make them move faster or build better products but to also help them build quality companies.
The company's premise is that it can be hard to stand out in these highly crowded consumer-facing industries.
He said that product features are too easy to copy and replicate so many apps and products share a similar feature set. Pricing features is another challenge. Content is becoming a commodity. However, quality is what we all have and it is what we feel when we touch a product.
Wiklund believes that poor quality can have a negative impact on a company's growth in several ways, including its reputation and the pace of product development.
He stated that we want to ensure that each conversion cycle within the product is as precise as possible.
According to the company, customers can increase product quality by an average of 20% within 30 days. It claims that its technology can provide insights that are more valuable that Net Promoter Scores (NPS), which are used by many product teams and are mostly based on surveys sent to businesses. Wiklund stated that such scores are more likely capture positive sentiments, and only a small fraction of users.
Creandum, a Swedish early-stage fund that also backed Shopify, Gradient Ventures and Google's AI-focused venture capital fund, contributed money to the round. This brings the total raised by the startups since their 2018 launch to $41million.
Wiklund reports that UnitQ will use the new capital to strengthen its engineering and go to market teams.
UnitQ was inspired by Skout, the previous company that Skout co-founded. This Andreessen Horowitz-backed social network had more than 50 million apps installed before it was acquired by MeetMe in 2016 for $28.5m in cash and 5.37 million common shares.
Wiklund recalls that during the decade of Skout's existence, we never forgot about the user experience. Our top priority was to ensure people were satisfied with Skout. A product like unitQ would have been a great help.
Andrew Braccia of Accel and Ben Fletcher from Accel were involved in the deal. They believe that being part of a repeat founding team that is intimately familiar with the problem they are solving is a huge advantage.
Customer feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Spotify, Cornershop and Strava rave about unitQ's ability to ingest data from app stores, internal support tickets, and social media feedback. They also correlate this data so they can find the best bug and improvement solutions for their products. TechCrunch spoke with Fletcher, who explained that they have a unique way of obtaining these data.
They believe unitQ is creating a new category that focuses on user feedback, and then linking it back to engineering and product teams.
Similar to PagerDuty's incident management system and DataDog's performance monitoring, unitQ is creating an entirely new category for product quality, quality scores, and indicators for end customers. We think this category would be very, really big, Braccia said. UnitQ insights are helping engineers ship code faster to the parts that are most important for their products.
