Market research startup Streetbees to create jobs with $5.1m funding

Global research platform Streetbees has raised $5.1m in seed funding.

Venture capital fund BGF Ventures led the round, with early investors including LocalGlobe and Octopus Ventures.

Streetbees enables consumer companies such as L’Oréal, Unilever, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Dyson and others to access the habits, shopping preferences or political opinions of ordinary people around the world.

Streetbees will use the seven-figure boost to drive its expansion strategy, which includes doubling the size of its 40-strong team in the coming 12 months.

The London-based startup wants to revolutionise the way international companies connect with consumers to gain insights by offering them access to anyone who is able to record their thoughts, attitudes and daily rituals using the Streetbees app, potentially cutting out the need for long surveys or static consumer panels.

Tugce Bulut, the co-founder and CEO of Streetbees, said: “In a world where brands are willing to invest huge amounts of resources to better understand their consumers, there has to be a better way to capture insights and Streetbees has found it.

“We use geolocation and mobile technology to engage the right person in the right place to answer brands’ questions.”

She added: “Streetbees’ grassroots research approach is providing the brands with the rich consumer insights they need at large scale at an affordable price as we connect them directly with their consumers without any intermediaries.”

Tugce founded the company in 2015 alongside Oliver May, a former trader with financial services firm Morgan Stanley.

BGF Ventures partner Harry Briggs commented: “Streetbees is disrupting the area of market research which has been carried out with the same traditional methods for years.

“People are waking up to the failings of political pollsters but market research can also be unreliable and Streetbees can solve that problem by providing rich qualified data in a new way that puts the world’s biggest brands directly in touch with their customers.”

Streetbees currently has more than 1m users across 87 countries, covering around 85% of the world population.

Over the course of the year, the firm expects to reach 10m users.

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