Blackbird is currently raising a fifth fund. It is expected that it will reach $1 billion. AirTree Ventures is also working with Square Peg Capital, OneVentures and OneVentures to create new funds.
This has meant that start ups across Australia are getting cold emails from investors keen to park their capital somewhere with the best chance of growth.
It’s a bubble at the moment,” Mr Humphrey said about the fund-raising environment.
Although I find the market a bit absurd, it is still a great game.
Dovetails Series A round was led by Accel, followed by Felicis Ventures and Blackbird, with Stewart Butterfield, founder of Slack, also contributing funding.
Mr Humphrey stated Dovetail was profitable and had a few cashflow-positive months last quarter.
Bradley Ayers, co-founder of Dovetail, and Mr Humphrey still own 66% of the company. However, both have taken some money off the table during a secondary round.
Dovetail claims that it has never had a staff member leave and is now doubling down on its engineering team. It is also focusing on expanding its San Francisco office.
Plans for expansion
Mr Humphrey stated that the company would expand its product to include more data formats and create a centralised Wiki for customers to help them understand their clients to sustain the $700M valuation.
The Dovetails product provides insight into customers’ thoughts and opinions. Employees can upload videos and transcribe them. Tag them. Write and share reports.
The product has been well received by legacy businesses such Deloitte (Porsche), Starbucks and Canva, as well as fast-growing tech companies Atlassian, Canva, and Shopify.
The company has also found unusual uses cases, such as the UK Department of Justice which interviews prisoners to better integrate them into society.
Businesses undergoing digital transformations must understand and collect customer feedback.
Improve customer feedback
But Mr Humphrey is keen to create a more data-rich internal Wiki. This will allow support staff to learn more about tools like ServiceNow, Zendesk or Atlassians JIRA product as well as review from Apples App Store and Googles Play Store.
Mr Humphrey stated that there is no way for companies to listen to only one type of feedback.
We want to create a rabbit-hole that new workers can use to get down so that they are able to see who their customer is within hours of starting a job.
The Dovetail strategy is based on the collection of all this data and the conceptualization of it. It also seeks to capture institutional knowledge that employees leave the business.
Mr Humphrey stated that products that can do this will be one of our major levers to continue growing.
Another reason for the large valuation is that research repository, a new category in software, is also a part of it.
Mr Humphrey doesn’t want to buy other start-ups, even if they have integrations with the many customer feedback tools.
The [companies]Mr Humphrey said that we’d love to buy them but they are too expensive. We could also build it ourselves.
