SturdyAI Inc. raised $3.1 million from investors that it will use for hiring as well as boosting sales for its customer intelligence software.
The round was led by Grotech Ventures and included other strategic partners.
The startup makes an artificial intelligence software platform that helps companies analyze elements of a customer relationship to gain insight. This is everything from contract requests, feature requests, tickets and chat, to determine how to boost engagement and lower churn.
The company was founded by a trio of Bay Area tech veterans. It landed in Portland at the start of 2020, said Joel Passen, chief revenue officer. Passen along with co-founder Steve Hazelton founded the company Newton in California in 2009 and sold it in 2016. Third co-founder Nathaniel Hazelton was an executive at Newton and built that company’s engineering team in the Fort Collins, Colorado, area.
With SturdyAI, the founders brought a lot of that former team together and were looking for a base of operations on the West Coast. They selected Portland from a field that included Denver and Boise, where Steve Hazelton is based. Portland won out due to the software-as-a-service creative and sales talent pool here.
“Denver is saturated and sprawling. Boise is still an underserved market from a tech talent perspective,” said Passen, who lives in Portland. “Portland clearly has a deeper talent pool. That was the impetus for (the move). You can attract people to an office in Portland, even if it’s a couple days a week.”
The headquarters is Portland, but Nathaniel Hazelton is based in Laramie, Wyoming, where he is building an engineering team in the Fort Collins/Laramie area, said Passen. The startup’s Portland office is in Slabtown on Northwest Raleigh.
The company has a team of 16 full time and expects to hire another 10 to 15 people over the next 20 months, Passen said. In the last eight months the company has shifted from proving the platform to converting those users to paying customers. It has about a dozen paying customers, Passen said.
The product has been in development for the past two years.
As a result of this funding round, Grotech Managing General Partner Lawson DeVries will join SturdyAI’s board.
"SaaS companies collect a ton of information from their customers every day, but much of it fails to convert to useful and actionable data,” DeVries said in a written statement. “Now using AI and automation businesses can proactively understand whether their customers are likely to churn, which features will entice them to renew, are they experiencing bugs, are they happy or not, and much more.”
As the economy is shifting, being able to understand how customers feel about a product and if they might churn is increasingly important, said Passen.
“These are revenue relationships,” he said. “Business is picking up because we help identify pockets of risk.”
Including this seed round the company has raised a total of $5.4 million. The company’s pre-seed round was led by startup accelerator Superset.
This is the third company that Steve Hazelton and Passen have founded together. Their previous businesses have been a mix of bootstrapped and venture backed. They opted to go the venture route with SturdyAI because they thought they could go faster and capitalize on the opportunity rather than starve the business unnecessarily.
“We felt this is a real needed system in the ecosystem,” Passen said.
