Intelligence platform raises £8.5m Series A funding with Atomico

Today (March 15), Streetbees has announced a $12m (around £8.5m) Series A investment, led by Atomico with participation from all existing investors including LocalGlobe, Octopus and BGF Ventures.

The global intelligence platform is to use the investment for further development in its core machine learning technology, which transforms the real-time data provided by its global community of users into actionable insights for brands - and launch its first office in the US.

Tugce Bulut, CEO of Streetbees, said: “Human behaviour is too complex to standardise and understand with multiple-choice questions and automated analysis, but this is what most research groups dish up time and time again.

“International companies need deep insight into unique drivers of human behaviour to be able to understand their customers and grow into new markets.

“Streetbees, which is backed by some of Europe’s smartest investors, captures the detail within people’s lives at scale and analyses it, helping companies both understand the bigger picture and act like an innovative start-up that has intimate knowledge of local markets.”

Over one million users – or ‘bees’ as the company suggests – across 150 countries worldwide use the chat-style Streetbees app to share moments from their daily lives via videos, photos and text, giving as much or as little information as they like.

By applying advanced natural language processing technology to the results, Streetbees uncovers not just what they do, but also why they do it, and what drives them – and predicts what they may do next.

As a result, Streetbees’ customers - including Unilever, PepsiCo, BBC World Service, Vodafone and L’Oreal - receive rich insights into communities anywhere in the world at an unprecedented scale and affordable cost, helping them decipher new markets.

Carolina Brochado, an Atomico partner who led the investment, added: “Traditional market research is slow, rigid and expensive, costing brands $44bn globally every year to produce consumer insights that are often woefully out-of-date by the time they are delivered.

“With Streetbees, we have found the world’s first real-time technology-enabled customer insights platform, giving brands dynamic responses, from real customers, for a fraction of the cost and time taken by traditional incumbents.”

With the new funding, Streetbees will further develop its machine learning technology platform to provide customers with a live stream of information from its users that is being collected around the world.

The funding will also allow Streetbees, which currently employs 75 people at its London headquarters and in Lisbon, to expand its data science team, develop its community networks across the world, and grow in the US, where the company opened an office in January 2018.

Streetbees’ mission is to make human data accessible, anywhere in the world.

Through providing better information containing real insight into how people behave, the company hopes to make data collection mutually beneficial for companies and global communities.

Ms Bulut concluded: “Companies fail to invest in the developing world time and again because they don’t understand the market, as they either can’t find the information they need, or they don’t trust what they have.

“By giving them a better solution that provides local detail and real insight into what people across the world do and why, Streetbees can enable major investment in nations where it might otherwise not occur - potentially fuelling economic growth where it is needed most.”