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Sprig, a provider of tools for consumer and software product research, announced today that it has raised $30 million in a funding round from Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, First Round Capital, Elad Gil and Faima Ventures. CEO Ryan Glasgow said the deal will bring the company’s total to $90 million to expand Sprig’s service line, support sales and marketing efforts, and provide resources for mergers and partnerships.
Glasgow founded Sprig in 2019. Before starting the company, he was an early team member and product manager at website builder Weebly and search app Vurb. While at Webley, Glasgow said he realized how difficult it was to conduct research throughout the product development life cycle, especially when timelines were tight and research resources were in high demand.
“While I had access to tools ranging from product analytics and A/B testing to recommendations and roadmaps, I was missing a quick and easy-to-understand tool. [Weebly’s] customers in real time,” he told TechCrunch. “I knew there was a better way, and in January 2019, I launched Sprig, then called UserLeap.”
At Glasgow Point, public metrics suggest that user experience research is rarely a priority. In the year A 2019 survey from UserZoom shows that companies struggle to integrate user research into product development, and even though most CEOs see user and customer experience as a competitive differentiator, budgets remain stagnant. According to one report, only 55% of companies are currently operating. Any User Experience Testing – Although it is estimated that every dollar spent on user experience generates $100 in revenue, Forrester Research has confirmed this.
Image Credits: Sprig
Sprig provides surveys and templates for research teams conducting user experience studies. But it went beyond this by analyzing open-ended question responses in surveys to summarize the results into themes. Using AI, Sprig recognizes “thematic similarities” between answers, Glasgow said — where there are no overlapping words and phrases.
“Sprig’s surveys are built with an architecture based on events (eg, opt-out, not using a specific feature) and user characteristics (eg, plan type or geography) after a minimum. Nor is there a one-time integration code,” Glasgow explained. “Companies working at … scale often consider building in-house interrogation equipment, which requires a dedicated team of engineers to operate and maintain. With a fully loaded engineer costing upwards of $200,000 per year, investing in a Sprig is a no-brainer.
Of course, research is often expensive—software-as-a-service companies spend 23% of their revenue on R&D, for example—and there’s no guarantee that it will lead to successful results. In a recent CB Insights poll, 42 percent of companies cited “lack of market demand” because one of their products failed to take off.
Sprig recently launched a Concept & Usability Testing service that allows companies to test ideas, concepts, designs and prototypes before deploying them to production. Concept and usability testing includes browser-based testing that allows participants taking the Sprig survey to evaluate one or more concepts, complete documented tasks, and provide feedback, allowing teams to recruit new participants for a research panel, product, or app.
Glasgow sees User Testing, UserZoom and Qualtrics as competitors in the fast-growing user experience tracking market. User Testing went public last year after raising more than $150 million in capital. Qualtrics’ IPO came as early as January 2021 and boosted the company’s market cap to $23 billion. Just in June, Maze — its closest rival — secured $40 million in a Series B round, while UserZoom closed a $100 million deal last April to acquire experience insights company EnjoyHQ.
Given the competition, Glasgow has been pleased with Sprig’s performance of late, which has seen net recurring revenue grow 300% over the past 12 months. (He balked when asked about annual recurring revenue.) Sprigg counts Dropbox, Loom and Square among its current clients, and the company plans to grow its headcount from 95 today to 125 by the end of the year.
“Sprig didn’t want the money, but we were proactively approached by our existing investors based on previous valuation increases. It went really well, so we did a quick internal that only took a few days,” Glasgow added. They must be guilty in order to improve. Sprig helps scale research programs by quickly uncovering insights so the team can focus on high-consumption work.
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