Ribbon raises GBP200k in pre-seed funding

Submitted 29/03/2021 - 3:43pm

User research platform Ribbon has secured GBP200,000 in a pre-seed funding round from investors including, MMC Ventures, RLC Ventures and a group of London based angel investors. 

Ribbon has been launched by solo-founder Axel Thomson, to help product managers, product designers and user researchers build better digital products by making it easy to connect with and interview your own users.

Digital product teams are always aiming to understand how the products they build are perceived by their users, and how they can improve their product offerings. To gather feedback from users, teams traditionally have had to recruit research participants themselves, or pay for access to panels of ‘professional testers’. 

Ribbon makes the process of interviewing users simple for product teams by letting them recruit and start interviews with people who are actively browsing their website. By using the Ribbon integration on their websites, product teams can start video interviews with the click of a button, and a participant will be automatically recruited from their own website within minutes. This means teams no longer need to go through the process of manually recruiting users, or outsource recruitment of participants to agencies with testing panels. 

This new approach of recruiting and interviewing users as they are actively using a product provides a wide range of benefits, making it possible to quickly start conversations with users when their experience of a product is still fresh in their memory. By removing a lot of the existing barriers to setting up user interviews, Ribbon makes it easier for product teams to continuously gather feedback and insights from users, and help them make better product decisions as a result. 

Ribbon is already live and is working with companies to quickly improve the platform through its early access programme. It will use this funding to further expand this programme and continue to invest in making it easier for companies to continuously do user research through the platform. 

Founder Axel Thomson, originally from Stockholm, Sweden, is a previous product manager with experience building products at high growth scale-ups. Before founding Ribbon, Axel was a product manager at UK-based ‘unicorn-valuation’ startup Gousto, where he led a product team focused on improving the user experience of Gousto's mobile and web applications. 

Dele Akinyemi, Investor at MMC, says: "Despite being recognised as one of the most valuable tasks in the product development process, teams often struggle to conduct user research with consistency at scale. We’re excited about the role well-tooled research teams have in the future of software and feature-development, and believe Axel and the Ribbon team have the vision to create a new standard in scalable user research and empirical, customer-led product improvement." 

Reece Chowdry, Founding Partner at RLC Ventures, comments: "We are delighted to be backing Axel at the very beginning of the Ribbon journey. The opportunity within the product analytics market is massive, and growing fast. As more and more businesses require the tools to draw richer and deeper insights from their users, Ribbon will be strongly placed to capitalise on this opportunity.”

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