AI tech startup Viable lands $5M to provide instant qualitative customer insights and shorten feedback loops

For decades, we’ve used computers to crunch numbers. But most of the data we use today is unstructured, varying from images, and text files to video and audio files. As such, we need new tools to analyze and gain insights from these types of data.

Enter Viable, a San Francisco-based analytics tech startup that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to automate text analysis. Viable is the first analytics startup to use the GPT-3 language model, from AI research and deployment company OpenAI, to extract immediate insights buried in customer surveys, helpdesk tickets, and app store reviews at an enterprise scale.

Late last year, Viable emerged from stealth with $3.9 million in funding to automate qualitative analysis powered by the GPT-3 advanced natural language system. With its success, Viable has since grabbed the attention of high-profile investors readying to help accelerate the company’s growth.

Today, Viable announced it has closed a $5M in funding to grow its operations, and support R&D and new hires. Streamlined Ventures led the round due to its interest in applied AI, with participation from previous investors Craft Ventures and Javelin Venture Partners. The round also includes investment from Merus Capital, GTMFund, STRΛTMINDS, Tempo Ventures, Micheal Liou, Bill Butler, and Samvit Ramadurgam.

Founded in 2020 by CEO Dan Erickson, Viable provides analytics software for making customer feedback actionable with automated aggregation, structuring, and analysis of text. With Viable, companies can ask any question and in seconds get plain-language answers from their customer surveys, help desk tickets, app store reviews, and more. Powered by GPT-3, an advanced language model, Viable is backed by Javelin Venture Partners and Craft Ventures.

Using its own technology powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3, Viable is able to analyze huge quantities of data and deliver customer feedback reports that are highly accurate. The new seed round will enable Viable to expand its go-to-market efforts, build even deeper analytical capabilities and grow its team across marketing, sales, and engineering.

In a statement, Erickson, “Creating simple solutions to complex problems is at the core of our mission. We believe that product teams deserve a better user experience than what’s currently available on the market and we have been able to streamline the analysis of reams of qualitative data using GPT-3 and our own proprietary software to ensure faster, more accurate, and more readable results, empowering product teams to deliver a better mousetrap. We look forward to the innovative and unique product improvements we are going to be able to make with the capital raised in this round.”

“We are thrilled to support Viable as the company continues to build out much-needed technology for product and business teams,” said Ullas Naik of Streamlined Ventures. “The intersection of NLP and applied AI is a nexus we are really excited about, and we look forward to helping Viable lead the charge.”

Since its inception two years ago, Viable has built strong relationships with customers across industries. Says David Ting, SVP of Engineering, at Nylas, a developer API platform, and a Viable customer, “Viable’s AI is able to extract trends in our feedback that we then validated by comparing to our manually generated reports. Viable was spot on and identified a growing issue with authentication that we immediately got to work fixing, complaints about authentication are now down 65%!”