AI startup Yogi closes $2.3M seed funding to expand its AI-powered customer feedback analytics platform

Yogi, an AI startup that provides actionable product insights and helps companies to better understand their customers, has raised $2.3 million in seed funding to expand its deep learning customer feedback analytics platform. The round was led RTP Ventures leading, and Felton Group LLC, with participation from the family office of Jaffray Woodriff and existing investors Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator (ERA).

Founded in 2017 by Chad Becker and Gautam Kanumuru, the Charlottesville, Virginia-basedYogi analyzes tens of thousands of data points in moments and isolates the key signals within the noise, then provides results through strategic visualizations that empower teams to dive into the details and manipulate their feedback data chronologically, categorically, and even emotionally for actionable customer insight.

“We’re extremely excited to have RTP Ventures and Jaffray Woodriff join Yogi as investors, along with our current investors, Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator (ERA),” said Gautam Kanumuru, Yogi co-founder and CEO. “From the beginning, it was clear that RTP and Jaffray were completely in tune with our mission to help companies effectively use customer feedback to build better products and customer experiences. Also, with their strong backgrounds in data science and AI, they truly understand our backend technology and how it will allow us to stand out from the competition.”

The Yogi platform is centered on advanced and scalable natural language processing algorithms, allowing it to provide granular analysis of unstructured customer feedback regardless of volume or source. Unlike existing business intelligence platforms that rely on frequency counts and statistical analysis to build visuals like word clouds, Yogi’s neural network technology provides contextual analysis by taking into account many of the factors a human does when reading and interpreting data, such as a word’s placement in a sentence. Downstream this leads to more robust, accurate results and more confident data-driven decision-making, enabling teams to actually understand how customers feel and what they care about.

Justin Wisz of RTP Ventures will be joining the company’s board. “We’re enormously pleased to lead this round of Yogi’s funding and back such a strong team,” said Wisz. “Yogi’s approach to interpreting volumes of disjointed feedback data and uncovering topical insights represents the next generation of business intelligence, and organizations will build better products and customer experiences with Yogi.”

Jaffray Woodriff, co-founder and CEO of Quantitative Investment Management (QIM) and representing investor Felton Group LLC said, “Yogi’s SaaS platform will enable subscribers to gain valuable insights on customer feedback. Their AI-powered software has more visibility into customer sentiment than is currently available on the market. I believe Yogi’s founder team has the technical skills and vision to deliver on the company’s potential. My family office, Felton Group LLC, is extremely excited to participate in Yogi’s seed round.”

Yogi’s early adopter clients range from consulting firms to mobile app start-ups to luxury retail brands. Yogi has already helped these businesses prioritize product improvements, innovate new product lines, and become more proactive towards customer issues. This new capital allows Yogi to further expand its core technology, enabling the company to prove its value proposition more widely and across industries. “We see the excitement users have for Yogi on a daily basis as we demo the product and iterate with current customers,” Yogi CEO Kanumuru said. “This funding allows us to grow our engineering and sales teams as we work towards expanding our customer base and increasing the functionality of the product.”