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STURDY.AI ANNOUNCES $6M SEED ROUND
Sturdy's Customer Intelligence Platform performs real-time revenue threat root cause analysis, and delivers cross-functional insights to the teams and systems to mitigate churn.
Portland, OR — April 1, 2025 — Sturdy.ai, a pioneer in AI-powered customer intelligence, today announced it has raised $6M in Series Seed funding. Voyager Capital led this round, with participation from Fortson VC as well as existing investor, Grotech Ventures. The funds will be used to deepen Sturdy’s AI capabilities, expand integrations with customer data silos, and grow its go-to-market and engineering teams.
Modern Teams Need Actionable Intelligence to Protect and Grow Revenue
With customer expectations higher than ever and retention under pressure, the need for proactive, AI-driven revenue insights has never been more urgent. According to industry data, reducing churn by just 5% can increase profits by up to 95%. Enterprises have spent millions on building silos of applications to get closer to their customers and create active communication channels in the hope of mitigating churn risk early. Yet, this has failed to provide the proactive warning signals required. Sturdy closes the gap by seeing across these silos for a unified view of customer communication.
“We’re creating an AI-first intelligent interface for all things customer. This allows Sturdy to provide an almost magical understanding of every customer interaction across every data silo,” said Steve Hazelton, CEO and co-founder of Sturdy.ai. “This funding enables us to move faster to empower teams to stay ahead of risk and unlock new revenue opportunities.”
Investors Bet Big on AI-Powered Revenue Threat Detection
The funding round attracted a strong syndicate of investors aligned on Sturdy’s vision for a more innovative, AI-native approach to revenue intelligence. Voyager Capital, known for backing category-defining SaaS platforms, led the round, with General Partner Diane Fraiman joining Sturdy's board.
“Sturdy is tackling one of the most urgent and overlooked problems in enterprise software—how to extract proactive insights from the flood of daily customer interactions,” said Diane Fraiman, Managing Director of Voyager Capital. “Retention has become a critical topic in boardrooms. We believe that every business will have a system of intelligence in the next 3 years. Sturdy’s platform is positioned to become essential infrastructure for any company serious about protecting and growing revenues while truly putting their customers first.”
“Sturdy is one of the most powerful and immediate applications of AI and natural language processing we’ve seen,” said Thomas O’Keefe, CEO of Solo LLC. “At both Solo and previously at Syntrio, it has delivered instant value—surfacing proactive, actionable customer insights and driving measurable improvements in retention.”
About Voyager
Voyager Capital is a leading West Coast early-stage venture firm, providing entrepreneurs with the resources, experience, and connections to build successful companies for today’s modern economy. Voyager invests primarily in B2B technology companies, including AI-driven business solutions, software-driven hardware, sustainable agriculture, and supply chain. The firm's domain expertise, go-to-market, and team-building resources are proven to help build market leaders. Voyager Capital has over $550 million under management with offices and resources in Seattle, Portland, Vancouver, and Calgary.
About Fortson VC
Fortson VC is a seed-stage venture firm based in the Pacific Northwest, built for exceptionally rare founders who are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. Led by Cole Younger, Fortson brings over two decades of early-stage investing experience and a disciplined approach grounded in authenticity, grit, and courage. While driven by curiosity, our primary focus is B2B software and the technological frontier around it—the infrastructure, intelligence, and automation shaping the future of how businesses create value.
About Grotech Ventures
Founded in 1984, Grotech Ventures is a leading early investor in high-potential technology companies. Grotech seeks innovative, early-stage investments across the technology landscape and continues to invest and add value throughout the life cycle of each portfolio company. The firm has a strong combination of financial backing, industry relationships, and deep domain and operational expertise to accelerate growth. With more than $1.0 billion in committed capital, Grotech supports early-stage companies through investments starting as small as $500,000. For more information, visit http://www.grotech.com.
About Sturdy
Founded in 2020, Sturdy is an AI-forward autonomous Customer Intelligence platform that proactively identifies churn risks across all customer-facing silos. Sturdy analyzes unstructured customer interactions—emails, calls, support tickets, chats, and more—discovering revenue threats, pinpointing root causes, and delivering cross-functional insights in real time. Sturdy has analyzed billions of customer interactions, giving it one of the largest proprietary datasets in the category and enabling its models to surface insights faster and more accurately than competitors. At a time when customer retention is a top priority for every business, Sturdy turns the noise of customer conversations into a strategic advantage.
For more information, visit www.sturdy.ai or reach out to Joel Passen at joel@sturdy.ai
Sturdy's Customer Intelligence Platform performs real-time revenue threat root cause analysis, and delivers cross-functional insights to the teams and systems to mitigate churn.
Portland, OR — April 1, 2025 — Sturdy.ai, a pioneer in AI-powered customer intelligence, today announced it has raised $6M in Series Seed funding. Voyager Capital led this round, with participation from Fortson VC as well as existing investor, Grotech Ventures. The funds will be used to deepen Sturdy’s AI capabilities, expand integrations with customer data silos, and grow its go-to-market and engineering teams.
Modern Teams Need Actionable Intelligence to Protect and Grow Revenue
With customer expectations higher than ever and retention under pressure, the need for proactive, AI-driven revenue insights has never been more urgent. According to industry data, reducing churn by just 5% can increase profits by up to 95%. Enterprises have spent millions on building silos of applications to get closer to their customers and create active communication channels in the hope of mitigating churn risk early. Yet, this has failed to provide the proactive warning signals required. Sturdy closes the gap by seeing across these silos for a unified view of customer communication.
“We’re creating an AI-first intelligent interface for all things customer. This allows Sturdy to provide an almost magical understanding of every customer interaction across every data silo,” said Steve Hazelton, CEO and co-founder of Sturdy.ai. “This funding enables us to move faster to empower teams to stay ahead of risk and unlock new revenue opportunities.”
Investors Bet Big on AI-Powered Revenue Threat Detection
The funding round attracted a strong syndicate of investors aligned on Sturdy’s vision for a more innovative, AI-native approach to revenue intelligence. Voyager Capital, known for backing category-defining SaaS platforms, led the round, with General Partner Diane Fraiman joining Sturdy's board.
“Sturdy is tackling one of the most urgent and overlooked problems in enterprise software—how to extract proactive insights from the flood of daily customer interactions,” said Diane Fraiman, Managing Director of Voyager Capital. “Retention has become a critical topic in boardrooms. We believe that every business will have a system of intelligence in the next 3 years. Sturdy’s platform is positioned to become essential infrastructure for any company serious about protecting and growing revenues while truly putting their customers first.”
“Sturdy is one of the most powerful and immediate applications of AI and natural language processing we’ve seen,” said Thomas O’Keefe, CEO of Solo LLC. “At both Solo and previously at Syntrio, it has delivered instant value—surfacing proactive, actionable customer insights and driving measurable improvements in retention.”
About Voyager
Voyager Capital is a leading West Coast early-stage venture firm, providing entrepreneurs with the resources, experience, and connections to build successful companies for today’s modern economy. Voyager invests primarily in B2B technology companies, including AI-driven business solutions, software-driven hardware, sustainable agriculture, and supply chain. The firm's domain expertise, go-to-market, and team-building resources are proven to help build market leaders. Voyager Capital has over $550 million under management with offices and resources in Seattle, Portland, Vancouver, and Calgary.
About Fortson VC
Fortson VC is a seed-stage venture firm based in the Pacific Northwest, built for exceptionally rare founders who are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. Led by Cole Younger, Fortson brings over two decades of early-stage investing experience and a disciplined approach grounded in authenticity, grit, and courage. While driven by curiosity, our primary focus is B2B software and the technological frontier around it—the infrastructure, intelligence, and automation shaping the future of how businesses create value.
About Grotech Ventures
Founded in 1984, Grotech Ventures is a leading early investor in high-potential technology companies. Grotech seeks innovative, early-stage investments across the technology landscape and continues to invest and add value throughout the life cycle of each portfolio company. The firm has a strong combination of financial backing, industry relationships, and deep domain and operational expertise to accelerate growth. With more than $1.0 billion in committed capital, Grotech supports early-stage companies through investments starting as small as $500,000. For more information, visit http://www.grotech.com.
About Sturdy
Founded in 2020, Sturdy is an AI-forward autonomous Customer Intelligence platform that proactively identifies churn risks across all customer-facing silos. Sturdy analyzes unstructured customer interactions—emails, calls, support tickets, chats, and more—discovering revenue threats, pinpointing root causes, and delivering cross-functional insights in real time. Sturdy has analyzed billions of customer interactions, giving it one of the largest proprietary datasets in the category and enabling its models to surface insights faster and more accurately than competitors. At a time when customer retention is a top priority for every business, Sturdy turns the noise of customer conversations into a strategic advantage.
For more information, visit www.sturdy.ai or reach out to Joel Passen at joel@sturdy.ai
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Live Workshop - The New Data Frontier — Leveraging Language for Customer Intelligence
Live Workshop: Leveraging Language for Customer Intelligence
Apr 28, 2022 10:00 AM Pacific / 1:00 PM Eastern
Register here
In B2B SaaS businesses, customer-facing teams interact with hundreds of customers every month via email, chat, support tickets, and video calls. Nearly 20% of those conversations contain valuable information that teams can use to improve products, strengthen relationships, and impact revenue. For subscription-based businesses, the insights that can be derived from a company’s language cube makes accessing this data a business imperative for leaders.
Customer language is an enormous data set. On average, a $30m B2B SaaS company produces more than 10,000 customer conversations every month. How closely are you listening?
Capturing, consolidating, and analyzing the true voice of the customer sounds like a good idea, right? To be a successful customer leader, your teams must be able to devise new ways to improve the overall customer experience and, at the same time, drive value. With a plan in place to use customer language — the authentic voice of the customer — your line of business is empowered to influence customer engagement through better product inputs, build deeper relationships with multiple stakeholders, and drive revenue retention and net dollar retention.
You and your team are invited!
Join Cynthia Beldner, Customer Success and Operations leader, for 30 minutes to see how innovative teams are leveraging customer conversations to:
- Gather valuable customer intelligence at scale
- Automate repetitive, inefficient yet critical tasks
- Turn the voice of the customer into data any team can access and use
This is also a great opportunity to see Sturdy in action.
Save your spot. Register now.
Salesforce integration 2.0: Enrich Salesforce with Sturdy Signal event insights
Sturdy’s two-way Salesforce integration makes customer insights – about products, processes, relationships, and revenue – actionable, trackable and reportable in any object in Salesforce.
Sturdy is a customer intelligence solution trusted by leading CX, product, and operations leadership at some of the most innovative B2B SaaS companies.
This easy to implement solution is designed to help businesses and organizations improve their products, processes, relationships, and revenue by using the most valuable data they already have: the conversations they’re having every day. Not only can Sturdy detect signals in conversations — in real time — accurately, now it can automatically push critical signals and insights to systems and humans that need this critical information the most - no coding required.
How to Enable Your Team
Sturdy detects events and insights– executive change, expansion opportunities, unhappiness – from your emails, call transcripts, chats, support tickets (wherever customers are talking with you)! The full details of the conversation and signals detected are sent to Salesforce. A new Signal Event is assigned to the right team member and, of course, recorded to enhance reporting, health scores, etc.
See for Yourself
Interested to learn more about how the Sturdy Customer Intelligence Platform can help empower your teams with the insights to build better products, relationships, and processes to help you teams scale? Request a demo and we’ll be happy to show you.
Announcing the new Renewal Signal
It is widely known that it costs five times as much to acquire new customers than it does to keep existing ones. Renewals are tied to more than just LTV (Lifetime Value), they also directly influence customer acquisition costs (CAC), budgeting, margins, and brand reputation. According to Gartner Group Statistics, 80% of your future profits will come from 20% of your existing customers. Renewals are the lifeblood of SaaS businesses. This is why we are excited to announce our latest language model that detects when customers are conversing about - Renewals.
Here is how it works.
Sturdy is an AI + automations platform that unites all user language and converts it to data so that other people, teams and products can leverage that data. For example, when a user says, “Hey, when is our renewal date?” in an email to the accounting team (or through any other channel), Sturdy will flag it. Next, using Sturdy's no-code automation engine, the signal is routed to the appropriate account manager or teammate (who likely would never have been notified or notified too late) who can take action.
In addition to relying on top-of-the-funnel demand gen activities to bring in new business, leaders must turn their attention to a key source of growth hiding in plain sight- your customers (we have a signal for this too - Expansion). Systematically detecting critical business signals like renewals and ensuring that the appropriate people on your team are responding quickly needs to be part of your growth playbook.
Announcing Sturdy Automations 💥
Whether your SaaS business serves 500 or 500,000 users, success hinges on relationships with your users. Unfortunately, listening to users isn't all that easy given the volume of everyday communications and the number of tools in play like email, ticketing systems, chat, video calls, Gong, etc. To compound matters, users are often communicating with multiple people on multiple teams. Deriving value from this data set that is practically hiding in plain sight has been, until now, nearly impossible.
Enter automation. Automation allows you to better understand your relationships with users and provide a better user experience in the process. Automation in this context is the process of using AI and robotic process automation to discover insights and trigger actions at scale.
Introducing Sturdy Automations
Take your workflows a step further with our automations! This new powerful functionality allows you to create your own automated workflows without writing a single line of code. Build out new combinations tailored to the needs of specific teams that want more information about your company’s users. Then extend workflows in the systems they work in the most. Today, Sturdy customers can begin adding custom automations in a few easy steps.
Step 1. Choose a Signal
The first step in building your automations is to pick a signal. A signal is transmission delivered intentionally or unintentionally by a customer that conveys information, instructions, or insights. Customers send signals that help us predict churn, capture references, get in front of renewals, prioritize features, and just run our businesses better. Our customers are giving us this information every day in email, tickets, chats, calls, and more. In fact, we know that nearly 17% of all user-to-business communications contain a signal.
Step 2: Select a field
Depending on the signal you've chosen in step one, you will then select a field. A field is a set of identifiers and attributes that describe a customer. Common examples of a field may include the customer ARR, segment, territory, support level, even custom fields are pulled into Sturdy. The list of fields is populated via API from your master customer database of record like Salesforce.com.
Step 3: Set a value
Now that the first part of our automation (signal + field) is ready, it is time to pick a value. Like fields, values are populated from your master customer database sent to Sturdy via API. For our automation, we selected the field Salesforce Account Customer Segment. The corresponding value in Salesforce is a monetary value imported from a pick list in Salesforce.com.
Step 4: Pick someone to notify
Your automation recipe is nearly complete. Now you just need to pick someone or a system to notify. To customize the exact notification that will occur, pick a notification method. Email and Slack are automatically enabled and available today. In just a few weeks, you can add Salesforce, your CSP, Jira, etc.
What’s next.
In the next few months, we’ll empower Sturdy users to create longer and more complex automation recipes with multi-step automations. And, later this year, our plan is to create a library of pre-prepared recipes to make it even easier to get started.
Sturdy's new Happy Signal means more customer references and deeper insights
Let's talk about the potentiality of happy users. They stay with your business longer and, on average, they spend 67% more than new customers. The power of user advocacy is punctuated by the demonstrable success of NPS leaders. In Fred Reichheld's recent book, The Ultimate Question 2.0 he notes that over the past decade the firms with the highest brand loyalty and subsequent NPS scores returned five times the U.S. median (for public companies with +$500m in revenue).
Happy users often require less support and inspire your customer-facing teams to deliver similar experiences across your user base. They provide valuable testimonials, reviews, references, and case studies. That’s we developed Sturdy's - Happy Signal.
Here’s how it works. We’ve built technology that detects items of importance like user happiness, among other things, in user-to-business communications like email, support tickets, video conferences, chats and more. For example, when a user responds to an email or support ticket with, “I can’t thank you enough --- you just saved me so much time! You’re the best!”, Sturdy will instantly recognize this as a signal, flag it, and get it to the right teammates.
Most businesses use CRM, spreadsheets, and reference management tools as the go-to location to find and request references but they lack functionality to build a sustainable customer reference pipeline. Continuously building a pipeline of references is a key use case and measurable value proposition for Sturdy.
Sturdy is like a lead generation tool for customer references. On average, businesses using Sturdy see a 2.5x increase in customer references in the first 6 months of getting started.
Sturdy releases new business Signal - Response Lag
The Response Lag signal calls out when customers are waiting for responses from customer-facing teams and are chasing your associates for updates, actions, access, etc.
Sturdys newest business signal is live in customer accounts. The Response Lag signal calls out when users are waiting for responses from customer-facing teams and are chasing your associates for updates, actions, access, etc. How do we do this? We start by ingesting every customer communication (emails, tickets, calls, chats, etc.). Then we use NLP/AI to discover signals like Response Lag. Next we transmit those signals to the people and systems so action can be taken.
While top line monetization opportunities tend to get the attention, often the biggest, near-term lift for B2B SaaS and SaaS-enabled businesses is operational in nature. The Response Lag signal gives managers insights into areas for service improvement and illuminates coaching opportunities that, ultimately, help to foster better relationships with customers.
Next up is our Security signal. It detects when Customers indicate in their conversation some sort of security concern, like: “Have you had a data breach?” Appropriately, look for the red customer signal called Security.
Sturdy releases new business Signal - Expansion
Expansion is a critical stage of a successful SaaS growth strategy and the overall customer journey. It’s all about further monetizing the customers you have, and broadening your footprint so you have a larger target market to pursue. That’s why we are excited to announce that we’ve added a new customer signal to our AI-powered customer intelligence platform called “Expansion”.
The new Expansion signal empowers Sturdy users to identify when their users express purchasing intent like adding more users, buying services, or upgrading their plan.
Given the volume of customer conversations across various communications channels, valuable customer signals like those that imply account growth are often trapped in layers of technology, across multiple teams, gathering digital dust. Our newest signal, Expansion, cuts through the noise and across silos to help customer success and account management teams seize on critical upsell opportunities.
Want to get Expansion signals? Getting started is refreshingly easy and won't strain your internal resources. 95% of the initial work to get started is done by the team at SturdyAI. Sturdy leverages data that you are already collecting with existing systems (email, CRM, ticketing systems, video conferencing, etc) and can be configured to leverage those same systems to receive insights so your teammates can work in the platforms they are most accustomed to. Clients typically start receiving their first customer signals in less than 4 weeks. Realizing value thereafter is nearly immediate. No change management or IT resources required!
Sturdy releases new Signal - How To
Sturdy's Data Engineering team has been hard at work developing new customer Signals. Late last month, the team added a new customer signal to our AI-powered customer intelligence platform called “How To”. This signal detects when your customers ask, “How do I do this?”. By listening for this type of interaction, SturdyAI users get immediate access to insights like:
- Which new or existing features do your customers need help with, either because they are confused by them or because they are very interested
- When seemingly small UI/UX issues become trends
- Which customers could benefit from more training, helping you to develop your champions
- How to improve your knowledge base, help text, and self-serve content
Next up, we’ll launch our new Expansion Signal. This signal will help to identify when your customers express purchasing intent like adding more users, buying services, or upgrading their plan.
Unhappy news from sturdy 😢
It’s weird to be happy to announce a new customer signal called ... Unhappy. Strange but true. New to Sturdy’s AI-powered customer intelligence platform is the Unhappy signal. The new model detects negative sentiment and customer frustration in emails, support tickets, chats, and video calls.
The Unhappy Signal is the first of many new Signals to come.
Unhappy is one signal in a series of new signals that Sturdy’s Data Sciences team is developing. The team is also exploring innovative ways to correlate causes of the negative sentiment with specific signals. For example, Sturdy will be able to show how specific bugs or account leadership changes impact customer sentiment. For those less familiar with what we are developing, the Sturdy platform scans emails, chats, support tickets, and other related customer communications. It then automatically detects signals that impact revenue, product roadmaps, references, and more.
Customer success, account management, customer marketing, and product teams use Sturdy.
Customer success, account management, customer marketing, and product teams can now more easily surface what is occurring, but also discern why it is happening because the platform automatically provides contextual highlights. That’s critical because all too often, the onslaught of customer communications is smothered by the sheer volume of messages. These large unstructured data sets stored in multiple systems in the cloud are not easy for companies to use on their own
No training, no change management required.
We aren’t here to reinvent and change the way teams or companies work. And that is what is so exciting about what we do. SturdyAI is the force multiplier for your business. If you already have a cutting edge BI tool, we just give it better data. If you have a killer CX app, we make it more insightful. If you have great Customer Success, Account Management, Operations, Marketing, and Product teams, we make them more efficient and provide them with better data.
More about us.
Led by a team of seasoned founders and B2B SaaS experts, Sturdy.ai is unlocking massive value from data hiding in plain sight. Using AI, Sturdy helps P&L holders preempt customer issues before they spiral and seize revenue opportunities in time to improve this quarter's results. Sturdy’s AI-powered customer intelligence platform detects critical signals from your customers and routes them to the right people at your company in real time, unlocking value and reinforcing process execution.
Sturdy is joining the Colorado Customer Success Community for CS Tech Day
Sturdy.ai is joining fellow SaaS technology innovators Prodoscore and Update.ai to share our solutions with the Colorado Customer Success community. Members will learn about the newest technologies available to customer success teams in an engaging format featuring live product demonstrations.
Customer success leaders and team members will briefly kick the tires on some exciting new offerings that can help lift customer retention rates, deliver better customer experiences, and increase productivity.
When: Wed, October 13, 2021 at 4:00pm MDT
Where: Register for free here
Who should join?
If you're a cloud computing (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, MSP, mobile) manager whose mission is to onboard, serve, retain, and grow customer relationships, this regional community is for you! Meetups feature networking, learning, and sharing ideas to combat customer churn and increase loyalty. This is a local chapter of the Customer Success Association (http://www.customersuccessassociation.com). Topics include new technologies, "best practices," management systems, and people dynamics. Attendance is free and all are welcome.
About Sturdy:
Led by a team of seasoned founders and B2B SaaS experts, Sturdy.ai is unlocking massive value from data hiding in plain sight. Using AI, Sturdy helps P&L holders preempt customer issues before they spiral and seize revenue opportunities in time to improve this quarter's results. Sturdy’s AI-powered customer intelligence platform detects critical signals from your customers and routes them to the right people at your company in real time, unlocking value and reinforcing process execution.
