Streetbees raises $39M in a Series B round as brands race to interrogate Pandemic-hit consumers

NelsonG · October 28, 2020

Streetbees started out as an app for consumers to snap pictures of supermarket shelf layouts and get paid. Consumer brands wanted to know if the supermarkets really had put them at eye level or not. Quickly, the startup realized it could interrogate consumers about how they felt about the brands themselves, turning their app into a new way to track consumer attitudes. With the pandemic hitting, brands now need tools like this to find out about consumer attitudes while they are stuck at home.

Today it announces a £30 million Series B round to accelerate its survey platform. It now has 3.5 million consumers capturing emotion and context ‘in the moment’ when they engage with brands on the app, and get paid small amounts to do so. Since the vast majority of decisions are made offline instead of online, Streetbees says it has a unique way to make the offline world visible and searchable.

This round was led by Lakestar and comes with participation from Latitude, Atomico, GMG Ventures and Octopus Ventures. Some 8 of the world’s 10 largest consumer goods companies – including PepsiCo, Unilever and Procter and Gamble now use Streetbees, in a market estimated to be worth £300bn.

Tugce Bulut, CEO, Streetbees said in a statement: “Streetbees is building the world’s first human intelligence platform with a completely proprietary dataset to index these offline moments in consumers’ own words. With this round of funding, we will accelerate the creation of a searchable world where brands can finally decipher human behavior and decode the real reasons why consumers do what they do.”

Christoph Schuh, Partner at Lakestar, says: “We are very proud to lead the Series B round and to join Streetbees on its successful journey. The market for customer research is largely controlled by an oligopoly of legacy panel players and has seen little disruption. Streetbees has an innovative always-on way of engaging with the customer base at global scale to quickly and accurately understand their evolving needs and behaviours. The uncertainty of the global COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the value and necessity in having a real-time product suite that turns raw data into customer intelligence and actionable insights.”

George Henry, General Partner, LocalGlobe/ Latitude, Said:“Much like Bloomberg became the platform of choice for professionals requiring up-to-the-minute access to financial market information, we have always felt that Streetbees will become the facto market research platform for brands needing real-time access to rapidly changing consumer markets.”

Alan Hudson, Managing Partner, GMG Ventures LLP, an investor in the round, explained: “In the current market environment, more than ever, brands need to obtain qualitative, quantitative, real-time and real-life consumer insights at scale. Streetbees’ global network of engaged consumers and its AI-based platform provide these insights and power its clients decision making, both at the strategic and operational levels.”