Customer insights startup Dovetail raises $5 million from Mike Cannon-Brookes & Culture Amp’s Didier Elzinga

Sydney startup Dovetail has raised A$5 million in a round led by US VC Felicis Ventures.

The raise was also supported by Mike Cannon-Brookes’ family investment vehicle Grok Ventures, Didier Elzinga, the co-founder of Culture Amp, and Blackbird Ventures.

The software company enables teams to make better decisions through deep customer understanding, and will use the funds to scale the reach of its customer research platform.

Dovetail was founded in 2017 by former Atlassians, Benjamin Humphrey and Bradley Ayers and now has more than to 1,500 paying customers and 35,000 users.

Dovetail has seen astonishing growth over the past 12 months, adding more than 1000 new clients. Its blue chip customer list includes DataDog, GitLab, Harvard University, IBM, Boston Consulting Group, Cisco, Deloitte, Mastercard, Shopify and Square.

Enterprise growth has topped 20% month-over-month and the team has more than doubled in the past year.

Co-founder and CEO Benjamin Humphrey said the company is planning to ramp up its international presence.

“This latest raise will give us a bit more cash to accelerate our team growth where we’re aiming to go from 40 to 110 people by the end of 2022,” he said.

“We always hear about the need for companies to house customer knowledge in a single place in order to build customer understanding, empathy, and drive customer-centric decision making. With a larger team, we’ll be able to release even more innovative features and products that enable organisations of all sizes to store, share, and collaborate on customer research data and insights.”

Dovetail also unveiled its latest feature, stories, which gives users a new way to save, curate and remix research findings and various data sources within the Dovetail platform. Customers can pull insights, video highlights, tags, interviews or entire projects from anywhere in Dovetail, incorporating them into a story.

Humphrey said Stories also makes it possible to identify important themes across projects that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Felicis Ventures MD Victoria Treyger said that before Dovetail, deep customer insights were buried across teams and difficult to access in a centralised way.

“From day one, the Dovetail team focused on building the world’s most robust research platform that delivered unparalleled customer insights to teams and grew organically via a scalable, self-service model, ” he said.

“As a result, Dovetail’s product led growth motion is driving a level of explosive customer adoption across mid market and enterprise customers that is matched only by companies like Canva, Dropbox, and Atlassian. We are thrilled to partner with the Dovetail team to bring the power of customer insights to companies around the world.”