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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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Sturdy is open
Sturdy has developed a BI product that analyzes customer communications, detects important signals, and empowers teams with real-time data to act on situations with speed and intelligence.
We’re thrilled to announce the launch of Sturdy, a ground-breaking business intelligence platform that leverages advanced data science in order to detect items of importance in customer-to-business communications.
In simple terms, Sturdy helps people at B2B SaaS businesses leverage a data set that is hiding in plain sight - data that your customers want you to use.
Trapped in communication layers, and across teams, are critical signals like, point of contact changes, potential references, churn likelihood, and competitor mentions. These signals gather digital dust in email accounts, ticketing systems, transcriptions, chat software, and CRMs - until Sturdy.
Customer-to-business communication data is an untapped data frontier. Massive value is realized when the data is aggregated, analyzed, refined, and redeployed. Sturdy was created to empower teams to act on mission-critical situations with speed and intelligence.
If you wanted your team to capture 10 new referenceable customers, what would need to happen? Or, how many of your customers got a new Point of Contact last month? Which customers asked for their Renewal Data this week?
As a leader you want to manage risks and capitalize on opportunities (we call them “signals”). Signals are sitting in email accounts, videoconferencing transcripts, chat logs, and buried in ticketing systems. They are manually captured, if at all, and then data-entered into spreadsheets and other systems. And you have to create, enforce and constantly train people on rules that change the way your teams work.
Not to mention, there is no analytical capacity.
The idea for Sturdy came from building, bootstrapping, and scaling successful SaaS businesses. We founded SturdyAI to empower businesses to solve problems that we faced as entrepreneurs and executives. Before SturdyAI, the capture of these signals has been inconsistent, fragile and inefficient.
We’re experienced executives and engineers. We believe that every business has revenue and earnings potential trapped inside of its communications systems.
In mid-2020, Sturdy received an investment from Super{set}, a team that has created $1.2b in exits. This accelerated our product development and commercial efforts. Partnering with Super{set} was natural. We share the belief that “data is the new oil” and that refining data defines the new basis of competition across sectors and problem spaces.
Many of us worked together at Newton Software. This is a company that we bootstrapped, scaled and sold to Paycor, one of the largest independent HCM companies in the world. At Newton, we lived by some simple rules. We live by these rules at Sturdy.
- If you make a mistake, tell someone right away. We’ll fix it.
- We design technology that we want to use.
- We sell software how we’d want to buy it.
- We support our software the way we would want to be supported.
- We do things the right way, not the easy way.
- We don’t take shortcuts.
We’re energized and ready to roll. Let’s talk.
We’re encouraged by the feedback and results from early customers using Sturdy. And, we’re fired up to help businesses preempt customer issues before they spiral and seize revenue opportunities in time to improve this quarter’s results.
What will you find in your data?
Click here to get access and see for yourself.
