Capital's Prodsight nets six-figure funding to move to next level

An Edinburgh-based start-up that enables businesses to gain insight from customer support analytics and data has secured a six-figure seed funding deal as it looks to take on more staff.

Prodsight's CEO and founder Tadas Labudis. Picture: Chris Watt

Prodsight, which was set up by Tadas Labudis and is based in Edinburgh’s CodeBase technology hot-house, will also use the cash injection to improve its product and grow its customer base.

The Royal Society of Edinburgh has invested £45,000 in the fledgling company and a pre-seed round raised a further £70,000. Investors in this first round include a number of prominent Scottish angel investors such as Alistair Forbes, Rob Dobson, Judy Wilson and Andrew Barrie.

More than half of the SeedHaus tech incubator partners have invested in the business including Robin Knox and Paul Walton, who are formerly of Intelligent Point of Sale.

Lithuanian-born Labudis, who is also Prodsight’s chief executive, said: “The business got off to a flying start and we attracted paying customers almost immediately but this funding is huge for us. It will allow us to build the team and move us on far more quickly than we could have otherwise.

“The customer feedback analysis space is still a relatively young market but it is growing and the opportunities are huge – there are currently some 1.5 million companies across the world using live chat functionality and generating billions of customer conversations.”

Labudis has been an entrepreneur since the age of 18, founding two start-ups while at the University of Glasgow. After graduating he worked as product manager at mobile app agency Kotikan and messaging start-up Yavi. It was while working in these roles that he found the inspiration to launch Prodsight.

Knox said: “I was really excited to hear about Prodsight. I know a customer centric mindset is essential but as a company scales, there is very often a customer disconnect.

“At first you are talking with customers constantly and very close to feedback. In time as more management layers emerge, you can lose touch with your customers.

“Prodsight is exciting as an investment for me. I can clearly see how executives easily reconnect with the customer and product teams can have actionable insight to work with, without having to spend days trawling through reams of live chat logs.”

The firm also has plans to use the funding to work with two natural language processing experts from the University of Glasgow to refine its conversation analysis processes.