Since launching in 2018, real-time market research platform Suzy has been making strides in introducing technology to a traditionally fragmented, slow, and expensive industry. Suzy’s advanced research tools enable brands to make data-driven decisions with quality consumer insight in an agile offering. Presently, over 200 brands including Johnson & Johnson, Chipotle, and Citibank partner with Suzy to capture their customer insights and 500M+ consumer research responses have been recorded on its platform. The company is on pace to do $20M in ARR this year.
AlleyWatch caught up with President Avi Savar to learn more about the market research industry, Suzy’s growth plans, and recent round of funding, which brings the total funding raised to $46M.
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
$34M Series C. Investors include Rho Ventures, Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, Triangle Peak Partners, and Foundry Group, who participated in both our Series B and Series C.
Tell us about the product or service that Suzy offers.
Suzy is a real-time market research platform that helps brands make better, faster, more data-driven decisions. The Suzy platform combines advanced research tools with the highest quality audience to deliver trusted insights in minutes.
What inspired the start of Suzy?
A decade ago, we built the first social media companies to help organizations create value for consumers through meaningful content and transformative ideas. Since then, the collective voice of consumers has spawned unicorns and crippled industries — rewarding companies who put customers first and destroying those who don’t. We wanted a way for brands to have the voice of their consumer at the table with them while making decisions. Traditional research is slow, inefficient, and expensive, but we developed Suzy to disrupt the market with a more agile solution.
How is Suzy different?
Current qualitative and quantitative research tools remain fragmented and too complex for researchers to fully maximize a mixed methodological research approach.
We also just launched Suzy Live, our first-ever qualitative research solution, in answer to traditional in-depth interviews that require a fragmented approach with different recruitment companies, moderators, interview platforms, and general logistics. With Suzy Live, we handle all of the logistics and make it easy for our brands to conduct interviews at a time when they need it the most. It’s simple, easy-to-use, and cost-effective, and is the fastest and highest quality end-to-end IDI solution on the market.
What market does Suzy target and how big is it?
The market research industry is dominated by large traditional service providers. In fact, 50% of the market resides with the top 10 companies — with IQVIA, Gardner, Kantar, and Ipsos taking the lion’s share of that. That “traditional” market is $50B strong with flat growth but broadening to $70B+ as new “business intelligence” in data/technology/analytics expands. That segment was valued at $17B in 2016 and is projected to reach $147B by 2025. Fundamentally, we work with companies that are looking to get a deeper understanding of their target customer – so that they can build products, services, and marketing programs that directly address their needs.
What’s your business model?
Suzy is bringing an enterprise SaaS model to an industry that is dominated by “cost per response.” We charge customers an annual license fee that gives them “always-on” access and puts the customer at their fingertips without the need for ad-hoc budgets or cost-prohibitive response-based models.
How has COVID-19 impacted the business?
The pandemic has created opportunities for Suzy to step in and help its customers during this difficult time. In response to changing market research needs created by the pandemic and restrictions on in-person focus groups, Suzy recently launched Suzy Live, a first-of-its-kind qualitative research platform for video-based consumer interviews.
What was the funding process like?
The fundraising process was extensive and involved lots of meetings with investors. We have great metrics and momentum as the company has grown from a dozen to nearly 200 customers in under 2 years. The process took a lot of time before we found the right fit and really wanted to find a partner who could add value strategically and also one that wrote check-sizes that made sense.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
Check-sizes today are so big that as an entrepreneur, you really need to think long and hard about how much and from who to raise. We did not want or need a massive amount of capital. We are a very efficient business and don’t need to throw money at growth – most investors looking at companies in our stage needed to deploy checks in the $20M range. We didn’t want to raise more than $10M, but we ended up expanding that number in order to accommodate.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
Check and growth rate were dominant factors as we have been scaling rapidly. In SaaS, it’s all about the math and the math formula. Fortunately, our formula works!
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
As the company continues to scale and grow, we have very aggressive goals to expand the staff, increase sales, and launch new products.
What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
It’s critical to validate your business model, product offering, or other key assumptions and data points. Validating key assumptions is what removes risk from your business – and investors hate risk! It’s not enough to say people “will” want something…the ballgame is showing that people are already using it.
With all that’s going on in the world, now more than ever, you need to focus on the key drivers of your business, develop a viable business model and a go-to-market strategy that is sustainable.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
We are looking at developing more robust tools, integrating a global offering, and opening up our API to accelerate product development and integration with 3rd party data sources and platforms.
We are looking at developing more robust tools, integrating a global offering, and opening up our API to accelerate product development and integration with 3rd party data sources and platforms.
We are excited to expand our product offering, hire more talented people, and deliver more value to our customers to further our mission of enabling human understanding.
What’s your favorite outdoor dining restaurant in NYC?
All of them. I want to commend every restaurant in NYC for their resilience and innovation in the face of insurmountable challenges. It’s the hardest moment in history for the restaurant and hospitality industries – and I recommend that everyone support their local restaurants however they can – be it dining outdoors or ordering in. So, my favorite spot… is every spot.
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