Sep 21, 2020

Ad agency vet Matt Britton has just closed a $34 million Series C round for his enterprise consumer intelligence startup Suzy, bringing its total raised to $46 million. Rho Ventures, Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, Triangle Peak Partners, and Foundry Group participated in the Series C round in March ($18 million) and September ($16 million). Foundry Group, Tribeca Venture Partners and Kevin Durant's 35 Ventures previously participated in series A and B rounds. Britton, the former CEO of the Publicis-owned ad agency MRY, launched the platform in 2018 , pitching it as Siri or Alexa for marketers. Crowdtap, its panel of 1 million US consumers, Crowdtap, lets marketers conduct surveys and research on subjects like product development and ad effectiveness testing. Suzy counts Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, Nestle, KraftHeinz, Chipotle, and Crayola among its enterprise clients. It has an annual revenue run rate of $20 million, with an 80% increase in clients in the past year, to 250, according to Britton. Supplement startup SmartyPants Vitamins has used to make decisions on product packaging and test the messaging in ads for SmartyPants Baby Multi & DHA supplements, said its SVP of brand Clay Nichols, while Microsoft has used Suzy since 2018 to do consumer research for thought leadership articles, blogs, and white papers, said Geoff Colon, head of Microsoft Advertising's brand studio. The platform has helped Microsoft cut its consumer research costs and move faster, which has become more important in the pandemic, he said. "You cannot do traditional research in a couple of weeks, Suzy has really sped up that feedback loop," said Colon. "With COVID-19, there's an even bigger emphasis on real-time knowledge." Suzy plans to use the new funding to add products, hire, and boost sales and marketing Britton wants to use the latest round hire to help double its headcount, now just over 100; boost sales and marketing; and roll out more products as the pandemic has opened up more possibilities. It's started testing out a feature called Suzy Live, for example, which allows companies to narrow down survey respondents into smaller focus groups for more granular research. "We're basically trying to cover every part of the market research journey, and something like focus groups at a time like now when companies can't conduct them in session has opened up a huge opportunity for us," he said. Looking ahead, Suzy wants to work with platforms like Facebook and Google to overlay its own panel data from Crowdtap with their data so clients can further segment their audiences. It also wants to grow Crowdtap's panel and incentivize existing users to stay. Britton believes these steps will help Suzy compete with enterprise software giants like Qualtrics and SurveyMonkey, as well as the likes of Ipsos and Nielsen. He sees other potential integrations. A company like Netflix, for instance, could use Suzy to track viewership, as Nielsen has done to measure linear TV, he said. "What we're trying to do is to create standards and tools that make it easy for people to ask their consumers questions during every stage of that product development lifestyle," he said. "Given the business model and panel we've built, here's no reason that we can't go into ad measurement and viewership measurement." Newsletter