Why we Invested: Quala

We are proud to announce that we have participated, alongside Underscore VC, in a $4M seed round for Quala.io, currently among the fastest-growing Customer Success Platforms (CSP). As Boston’s leading angel group, we are excited to back a technology which we believe has very broad applicability for our members and their networks. We have already invested behind other young companies which are Quala customers and expect to see that trend continue!

As with any of our investments, we looked into the team, product and market. We couldn’t be more pleased:

Team: Focused, Empathic

We have strong conviction behind Jonathan Tushman and Sonciary Honnoll, first and second-time founders respectively but long-time tech executives. We appreciate their empathic approach to team-building, transparent organization, and fresh attitude to a category candidly plagued by slow-to-launch, bloated incumbents. They are “fully formed adults”. This is exactly the kind of team we want to back.

Market: Ripe for Disruption

Customer success teams have long struggled to find a simple and effective solution to improve workflows and productivity. Everything from manually sorting through data spreadsheets to navigating complicated and ineffective systems has been tried.

Current CSPs exhaust the resources of product engineering and render customer success teams inefficient by producing unreliable customer health scores and insights on behalf of Customer Success Managers (CSMs).

CSMs spend 80% of their time interacting with customers obtaining countless insights that become skewed and defective through spreadsheets and faulty CSPs. Automation simply cannot give a human point of view on qualitative insights the way a CSM can.

Quala’s Solution: Taking a Human First Approach

Quala has created a solution with a simple yet remarkably accurate and efficient Customer Success Platform that is built by a CSM, for the CSM. Now, organizational leaders can obtain accurate qualitative insights through the platform’s “CSM Sentiment” which will allow them to pair qualitative insights directly from human CSM’s at scale with usage metrics to create an accurate representation of customer health. Quala’s new platform is groundbreaking in its ability to be a fast, simple, and single source of customer truth.

“Here at ThankView, we do business with humans, not logos. Quala allows us to build a world-class customer experience by providing actionable insights across the 1,300+ organizations and 7,500+ people that our platform and team supports. I couldn’t imagine scaling our customer success team without it,” said Nadya Collins, Chief Customer Officer at ThankView.

The Platform:

The capital from Underscore, TBD Angels and others will allowQuala to continue building improved CRM integration, a brand-new UI, and fantastic platform CX. It also funded additional senior hires to lead both the sales and engineering teams for the platform, which helped to scale and meet market demand.

Rob Biederman is a member of TBD Angels