- AI-powered consumer intelligence platform Spiketrap announced that it has raised $3 million in a seed round of funding led by Susa Ventures
AI-powered consumer intelligence platform Spiketrap announced that it has raised $3 million in a seed round of funding led by Susa Ventures with participation from 645 Ventures, Pathbreaker Ventures, Oceans Ventures, WndrCo, SV Angel, Anorak Ventures, Harry Stebbings of 20VC, and several strategic angels.
About 90% of all data on the internet is unstructured and brands that neglect this data are making major decisions on a fraction of total information. Spiketrap’s AI-powered platform enables companies and brands to understand conversations at scale in real-time while accelerating customers’ speed-to-insight and providing rich data for data-driven decision-making. And its proprietary technology is capable of ingesting massive amounts of data in real-time and to contextually understand what is being discussed while eliminating spam and noise.
The company’s first set of customers has been video game publishers, developers, and streaming platforms, including Ubisoft, Bethesda, 2K, and numerous equity research companies that are focused on the media and entertainment space. And Spiketrap initially focused on the video game industry as its customer base presented specific opportunities to add immediate value to a market that continues to push technology boundaries and has an infrastructure in place to respond quickly to real-time high-quality insights. Plus it plans to use these funds to double-down on its mission to help global brands make better and more informed decisions based on audience conversations while expanding beyond games into additional verticals such as movies, streaming television, and more.
Spiketrap also bolstered its commercial presence late last year by adding Mike Owen (former CRO at AdColony and Senior Manager at Apple’s iAd) as its Chief Business Officer.
Key Quotes:
“We built Spiketrap to help brands understand their audience at scale and in real-time through intuitive and compelling AI-powered data and visualizations. Our core technology understands language at scale, and is industry agnostic. We’ve looked to the conversations developing online in the gaming community first, giving us confidence knowing that if we truly understood this, we’d be able to provide insights for any brand that has a highly-engaged and vocal audience. Spiketrap has helped our customers understand everything from which in-game items excite or frustrate their players to which influencers have the attention of their players. While I’m incredibly proud of the progress we’ve made to date, I’m looking forward to the next phase of the company. We couldn’t be more excited to have built this syndicate of investors who are in a place to help us accelerate our business and expand our customer base.”
“(Mike Owen) has already been a force-multiplier for us in terms of our ability to execute at massive, commercial scale. We’re at a really exciting inflection point where the market is recognizing the absolute necessity of the technology we’ve been building,” said Fitzpatrick.
-Kieran Fitzpatrick, Co-Founder and CEO at Spiketrap
“As an investor, I’ve never seen a product become indispensable for the top companies in an industry so quickly. What makes Spiketrap’s product so special is its combination of advanced natural language processing techniques with a deep understanding of the entities and terms in each industry. This pairing results in useful, specific, actionable insights in which no other product comes close. Best of all, users don’t have to write any complicated queries or learn advanced boolean algebra, as key insights are automatically surfaced. Spiketrap is already used by the Who’s-Who of the gaming industry, and I’m excited about their expansion into other industries like movies and consumer goods.”
-Leo Polovets, Co-Founder and General Partner, Susa Ventures
“Data is vitally important when it comes to understanding public sentiment and Spiketrap is enabling teams to unlock a massive amount of previously unavailable — or at least unstructured — insights from across the web. The product is enterprise-ready and some of the biggest names in gaming have already validated that Spiketrap is a ‘need-to-have’ in order for them to stay competitive. We are excited to see similar adoption across streaming, media, and consumer goods soon.”
-Aaron Holiday, Co-Founder and General Partner of 645 Ventures
“It’s increasingly rare that startups build novel AI internally. Today it’s common to apply the innovations open-sourced by Facebook, Google, and others. Spiketrap is unique in that its talented team of scientists and builders united to build proprietary AI for industry-specific problems. And their positive impact on customers has been profound.” Pathbreaker Ventures, an early-stage VC firm focused on AI, Robotics, and Computer Vision, led Spiketrap’s Pre-Seed round in 2018.
-Ryan Gembala, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Pathbreaker Ventures
