Tetra Insights Inc. has raised $1.38 million in its first round of venture capital this week as it builds a platform to turn customer mood and feelings into actionable information.
The company raised the funds out of a $2.06 million round from 28 investors, according to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The round was led by San Antonio-based Active Capital.
Tetra is developing software that takes raw audio and video of customer interviews and searches for insights as to how those customers feel about various products or services.
CEO and co-founder Michael Bamberger previously founded Alpha UX and OptimizeIQ, two New York City-based startups also in the realm of customer insight analytics.
In an interview with BizWest, he said the vast majority of customer data is quantitative, such as how much someone buys a product or when. However, he said relying almost solely on that data has led to skewed business models, such as social media networks that aim to keep people on their platforms as long as possible by heightening their psychological states.
“All of that qualitative insight balances that out, and we are really humanizing data instead of seeing people as numbers and rows in a spreadsheet,” he said.
But over the last few years, industries have been shifting towards using qualitative data, or patterns that are descriptive, to determine how customers are interacting with its products.
While Bamberger grew up and spent much of his career so far in New York City, he moved to Boulder to run Tetra because he wanted an environment where there was less pressure to create a company with rapid growth and quick returns for early investors.
He said he intends to build the company over the next decade through being efficient with capital instead of burning through cash quickly. However, his short-term sales targets in the next three to five years is to be making tens of millions in revenue.
The sales goals beyond that are exponential.
“Our aspirations for this company are massive,” he said. “We want to be doing tens of billions of dollars of revenue in the next few years.”
This article originally appeared in DailyCamera.
