TheyDo is an Experience Context Platform that helps enterprises organize customer journeys, evidence, opportunities, and business outcomes into a shared context layer for decision-making and AI-enabled CX operations. Pulse 2.0 interviewed TheyDo co-founder and CEO Jochem van der Veer to learn more.
Through-Line In Jochem van der Veer’s Career
What’s the through-line in your career that led you to focus on making customer-centricity operational at enterprise scale? Van der Veer said:
“I am a designer by background. Early in my career, I worked at agencies building experiences for brands. I often saw that meeting the brief did not necessarily mean customers were satisfied, because the work was not always grounded in real customer needs. That pushed me toward work that invests as much in discovering the real problem and solution as it does in delivering the outcome. Over time, that became a focus on how customer understanding can be turned into repeatable practices that hold up inside large organizations.”
Building TheyDo
What specific “this is broken” moment made you decide to build TheyDo (instead of continuing in consulting/service design)? Van der Veer shared:
“After leaving the agency world, I started a strategic design consultancy with my co-founders. We quickly realized we were moving from one transformation project to another and starting from scratch each time, sometimes even with the same customer. That was the breaking point. If we wanted customer-centricity to stick, it needed a system that outlived a single project. So, we built software to support that work, and when customers began asking for licenses, it became clear that the product itself was the path to scale. And that is how TheyDo was born.”
Primary Responsibilities
What are your primary responsibilities as CEO, and where do you personally spend most of your time? Van der Veer pointed out:
“My responsibilities as CEO and co-founder center on setting product direction, staying close to customers, building the team, and driving go-to-market execution. A major part of my focus is guiding how we evolve journey management toward what we describe as experience intelligence, so enterprises can use structured journey data to support real business decisions.”
Gap Between Insight And Execution Being Solved
Why did traditional journey mapping stop working for enterprises, and what’s the gap between “insight” and “execution” that you’re solving? Van der Veer noted:
“Traditional journey mapping did not stop being useful. It just stopped being enough.Most large organizations already have customer insight. The real problem is that the insight, the teams, and the decisions are still fragmented. Each team often makes decisions that make sense from its own perspective, but not from the customer’s perspective. That is where the gap between insight and execution starts.”
“A lot of customer experience work is also still backward-looking. Companies collect data, analyze it, build reports, and then hope someone acts on it. In practice, that often means the root cause never gets addressed. The contact center may close the immediate issue for the customer, but the broader loop stays open because the upstream problem remains.”
“What we are solving is that outer loop. Journey management helps organizations connect signals across the experience, quantify what matters, and decide what to fix at the root-cause level rather than just optimizing one part of the business.”
Core Products
What is TheyDo, who is it for, and what does it replace in a modern organization? Van der Veer explained:
“TheyDo is an Experience Context Platform for enterprises. It uses customer journeys as the structure for organizing experience data, evidence, opportunities, and business outcomes. Rather than treating journey work as isolated documentation, TheyDo turns it into a shared context layer across teams, so people and AI systems can understand what is broken, what needs to be fixed, who owns it, and what business outcome is at stake.”
Key Features
What are the 2–3 capabilities customers can’t live without, once adopted? Van der Veer pointed out:
“What enterprise customers value most is not any single feature in isolation. It is the ability to make better decisions in complex environments.”
“First, they need structure. In large organizations, customer experience data is fragmented across teams, systems, and moments in the journey. Customers value having that brought together in a way that reflects the actual customer experience rather than the company org chart.”
“Second, they need better prioritization. One of the biggest problems in large enterprises is solving what looks urgent from one team’s point of view without understanding what matters most across the wider journey. Customers value the ability to connect signals, understand root cause, and decide what will actually have the biggest impact.”
“Third, they value speed. Once the data is structured in the right context, teams can move much faster from ‘we think something is wrong’ to ‘we know what matters and what to do next.’”
“In practice, what customers rely on most is the combination of structure, evidence, and action. They need a way to organize experience data around the journey, prioritize what matters most, and trust the recommendations they bring to the business because the underlying evidence is clear.”
Evolution Of The Company’s Platform
How has the platform evolved since launch (especially around data, governance, and AI)? Van der Veer commented:
“Journeys used to be static maps. Over the last few years, we’ve worked to make journey management a business process, with journey data and dynamic, collaborative interfaces. Where this is going next is journeys becoming more like a data model, with qualitative, quantitative, and work data, so they generate decision data across large, complex organizations.”
“With TheyDo Agent, we are moving beyond AI as a summarization layer. The agent works from the structured context already built inside TheyDo: journeys, phases, steps, evidence, opportunities, and business outcomes. That means it can help teams build and maintain experience context, surface what needs attention, generate stakeholder-ready briefings, and connect CX work to business outcomes. We’re also adding capabilities like Collections and Docs so this context can be delivered to different stakeholders in the form they need.”
Milestones
What have been the 2–3 biggest milestones so far (product, customers, category validation, team, etc.)? Van der Veer cited:
“A recent milestone was being named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Customer Journey Management Platforms, Q4 2025. TheyDo received the highest possible scores in 18 evaluation criteria, including business impact and ROI analysis, coordination of journey improvement actions, system integrations, and generative AI capabilities.”
“A second milestone was commercial momentum. We reported that enterprise revenue more than doubled year over year through July 2025, driven by adoption in financial services, retail, and travel.”
“Finally, we’ve had a number of important partnerships and product updates in the last year, including partnering with PwC, and the launch of Ask TheyDo and TheyDo Agent. These are all parts of our shift toward experience intelligence and decision support.”
Customer Story
Can you share one concrete customer story where journey management led to a measurable business outcome? Van der Veer highlighted:
“Yes. Pfizer provides a clear example. Grace de Athayde, Customer Journey Operations Lead Advisor at Pfizer, described how her team used the agent to analyze a mapped journey. It suggested missing elements and additions, with sources from existing documentation to clearly highlight gaps. When mapping a specific patient healthcare journey, she noted that it outperformed competitive AI tools, including copilots and AI services embedded in creative products. The platform is helping the Pfizer team reach journey-management readiness in about 20 minutes, which represents at least two to three hours saved per journey.”
Company Metrics
What can you share publicly about growth, funding, or traction? Van der Veer revealed:
“We’ve raised $50 million to date, and our enterprise revenue has more than doubled year over year for four consecutive years.”
“We’ve also seen strong external validation of the category and our position in it. In 2025, TheyDo was named a Leader in The Forrester Wave for Customer Journey Management Platforms, receiving the highest possible scores in 18 criteria, including business impact, ROI analysis, journey improvement coordination, systems integration, and generative AI capabilities.”
“Beyond revenue, one signal I pay close attention to is usage depth. Enterprises are not just mapping journeys. They are using journey data to drive cross-functional prioritization, align decisions, and act on root causes. That shift from documentation to decision-making is where we see real traction.”
Opportunity Size
How do you define the market/category you’re in, and how do you size the opportunity? Van der Veer determined:
“We operate at the intersection of customer experience management and business intelligence. Traditionally, journey management was seen as a way to map experiences. What is happening now is that it is evolving into something much more operational. Forrester describes the category as moving from static maps to dynamic management systems that support prioritization, execution, governance, integration, and ROI tracking.”
“The way I think about the opportunity is less as a narrow software category and more as a broader shift in how enterprises make decisions. Journeys were always valuable because they gave teams shared context. That matters even more now, because both people and AI systems need that context in order to make good decisions.”
“We are building the context layer for experience data. Any team in a large enterprise that touches the customer experience also has an impact on the business, and those teams need to understand the situation the customer is in when they make changes. That is why we focus on large enterprises across the US, EMEA, and APAC.”
“So for me, the opportunity is enormous. Context is becoming essential infrastructure, both for human decision-making and for AI-driven workflows, and that is where we see the market expanding very quickly.”
Differentiation
Who do you most often get compared to, and what’s the simplest explanation of what makes TheyDo different? Van der Veer affirmed:
“We are often compared to journey mapping tools, CX analytics platforms, or generic AI copilots. The simplest explanation of what makes TheyDo different is that we are not adding another chatbot or dashboard on top of disconnected systems. Most CX teams already have plenty of data. The problem is that the data lacks shared experience context.”
“What we do differently is structure journeys, evidence, opportunities, and business outcomes into a context layer that both people and AI can reason over. Generic AI can summarize what it receives. TheyDo Agent is designed to reason across structured customer context and cite the evidence behind its outputs.”
“So the difference is not just that we help companies see the experience. It is that we help them make trusted, evidence-based decisions about what to fix next.”
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Top Priorities
What are the company’s top priorities over the next 12 months? Van der Veer emphasized:
“Our top priorities over the next 12 months are about scale.”
“First, we want to maintain our enterprise momentum across the US and Europe as more organizations move from journey mapping toward journey management as a real operating discipline.”
“Second, we are focused on broader enterprise adoption of experience context. This is no longer just about one CX or design team. Product, service, marketing, operations, and leadership teams all need shared context to make better decisions.”
“Third, we are investing in agentic CX operations. TheyDo Agent, Collections, and Docs are designed to help teams build, maintain, query, and share experience context in natural language, while keeping outputs tied back to source evidence. Over time, we see TheyDo becoming the context layer that supports AI workflows across the organization.”
Closing
What’s one thing you believe about building journey-centric companies that most executives still underestimate? Van der Veer concluded:
“I think many executives still underestimate that customer experience is no longer just a department-level concern. It is becoming a business capability.”
“The companies that get the most value from journey management are not the ones that treat CX as a reporting function. They are the ones that use it to shape priorities, influence decisions, and guide action across the organization.”
“That shift matters because the future of journey-centric companies is not about producing better maps. It is about making experience intelligence part of how the business operates.”
