Deep learning startup Chattermill raises £600k

London-based Chattermill has closed a seed round of 600,000, gaining funds that should help it boost its development of machine learning technology.

The deep learning startup applies artificial neural networks to customer feedback that learn from a company's data to help it make better decisions. It attempts to measure customer feelings about the design of the company's app, the speed of delivery and how customers feel about customer care agents.

The company was co-founded by Mikhail Dubov and Dmitry Isupov in 2015 who met at Entrepreneur First, a London-based company builder and startup accelerator that introduces potential co-founders to each other in order to form a team.

The total amount Chattermill has raised is 935,000 as the startup had an earlier round of funding in 2016 from the same group of investors. The funding will be used to invest in technology and continue growing the team with new hires including data scientists, engineers and business developers.

Co-founders Dmitry Isupov and Mikhail Dubov

Its product easily integrates with a number of tools, such as SurveyMonkey, Zendesk, TypeForm or Salesforce, and aggregates every piece of feedback to produce a thorough analysis of customer experience. The startup is currently working with customers across sectors that include, fintech, e-commerce, travel and gaming.

Chattermill has been backed by Entrepreneur First, Avonmore Developments and angel investors including Jeff Kelisky, CEO of Seedrs.

"We're thrilled to have the ongoing support of such a great list of investors," said Mikhail Dubov, the CEO and co-founder. "We've been lucky enough to help some of the world's most customer centric businesses see genuine value by understanding their users at scale. Our platform not only challenges their assumptions, but gives them incredibly detailed insight in real-time, at a fraction of the cost of traditional customer experience research."

Chattermill has a number of fast-growth businesses as clients already including Transferwise, Deliveroo, HelloFresh Just Eat, and TSB.

"Chattermill enables our teams to take customer insights deeper than ever before and focus on the key factors that make a difference to our users and drive our growth," said Nilan Peris, VP of growth at Transferwise. "We have more than a hundred people across the business using Chattermill to ensure Transferwise is always at the cutting edge when it comes to customer experience."

LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman invested in Entrepreneur First in September. His venture capital firm Greylock Partners led a $12.4 million funding round and was joined by Lakestar Capital and the founders of Deepmind.

"We saw the opportunity in Chattermill from the very beginning and are happy to continue to back Mikhail, Dmitry and their growing team," said Matt Clifford, CEO and co-founder of Entrepreneur First. "They are a fantastic example of how machine learning and AI can dramatically impact product development by listening to what the customer really needs. We're all very excited to see what happens in the coming year for Chattermill and see what other learnings they can provide their customers."

Chattermill joins a number of UK AI startups that have raised funding including Graphcore, who raised $50 million in November, as well self-driving car startup FiveAI who raised 26.8 million in September.

Image sources: Chattermill