London's ChatterMill snags $8 million to grow its big-brand customer experience platform beyond the UK

ChatterMill, a London-based platform for understanding customer experience, has raised an $8 million Series A round to expand beyond the UK. The round was led by DN Capital, with participation from Ventech, btov Partners and Silicon Valley Bank. Several angel investors also participated, including Matt Price, a senior vice president at Zendesk who will join the startup’s board. The point of ChatterMill’s deep learning platform is to collect customer feedback and deliver insight to decision makers while that data is still relevant. Aggregating data from surveys, reviews, support tickets and social media, the platform mines customer feedback for meaning and sentiment. “Our mission is to help every business become truly customer-focused,” said Mikhail Dubov, CEO and co-founder of Chattermill. “Every decision made at every level of the organisation should be taken with the customer in mind if teams want to win in today’s experience economy. This isn’t limited to Customer Experience departments, but should inform everyone across product, operations, marketing, and the leadership team.”

Co-founded by Mikhail Dubov and Dmitry Isupov in 2015, the startup now serves big brands, such as HelloFresh, Uber, Deliveroo and Zappos, that need to analyse high volumes of data across multiple languages. Transferwise started using Chattermill’s solution in 2017 when high growth made it impossible for them to keep manually interpreting customer feedback. Since then, Chattermill has been used by over 200 people across multiple teams at Transferwise. Nilan Peiris, vice president of growth at Transferwise, said: “Chattermill enables our team to take customer insights deeper than ever before and focus on the key factors that make a difference to our users and drive our growth. I’ve seen first-hand the value a product like Chattermill’s can add to a company and that’s why I decided to invest in this round.” With the funding, the company will expand its offices in London and Berlin, hiring  engineers, data scientists, enterprise sales and marketing experts.