Streetbees has announced it has closed a $40 million Series B round to accelerate the development of the world’s first human intelligence platform.
The funding round, led by Lakestar with participation from Latitude, Atomico, GMG Ventures and Octopus, recognises the potential for Streetbees to address a global market estimated to be worth $400bn.
With its own community of 3.5 million consumers capturing emotion and context ‘in the moment’ when they engage with brands, Streetbees uncovers unique growth opportunities by applying deep neural networks to analyse this unstructured data.
“Human reality is incredibly complex, and while technology has made progress in healthcare and pharmaceuticals, we’re still no closer to truly understanding the decisions that we make. Our behaviour is captured online and in the artificial reality of social media, but the near 80 percent of our lives that happens in the offline world, remains untapped,” explains Tugce Bulut, CEO, Streetbees.
“Streetbees is building the world’s first human intelligence platform with a completely proprietary dataset to index these offline moments in consumers’ own words. With this round of funding, we will accelerate the creation of a searchable world where brands can finally decipher human behaviour and decode the real reasons why consumers do what they do.”
Advances in data science and the proliferation of smart devices allowing consumers to share their brand experience in real time has seen 8 of the world’s 10 largest consumer goods companies – including PepsiCo, Unilever and Procter and Gamble – rely on Streetbees to provide intelligence they cannot find elsewhere.
Christoph Schuh, Partner at Lakestar, added, “We are very proud to lead the Series B round and to join Streetbees on its successful journey.
“The market for customer research is largely controlled by an oligopoly of legacy panel players and has seen little disruption. Streetbees has an innovative always-on way of engaging with the customer base at global scale to quickly and accurately understand their evolving needs and behaviours.”
LocalGlobe, an early investor in Streetbees, is investing again through its breakout fund, Latitude. George Henry, General Partner, LocalGlobe/ Latitude, explains, “Much like Bloomberg became the platform of choice for professionals requiring up-to-the-minute access to financial market information, we have always felt that Streetbees will become the facto market research platform for brands needing real-time access to rapidly changing consumer markets.”
Alan Hudson, Managing Partner, GMG Ventures LLP, an investor in the round, explains, “Streetbees’ global network of engaged consumers and its AI based platform provide these insights and power its clients decision making, both at the strategic and operational levels.
“We are delighted to continue our support of the company in its latest funding round and look forward to seeing Streetbees continuing to thrive.”
Over the past 12 months Streetbees has achieved 150 percent revenue growth and is currently headquarted in London with offices in Lisbon and North America. The series B round will fund data acquisition across a variety of new verticals and also increase the startups headcount from 100 to 230 over the next 12 months.