Astella Investimentos led a US$1.6m round in Birdie, a Brazilian data analytics and market research platform for consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands. Samsung invested R$200k in 2019 in Birdie as part of its Creative Startups acceleration program.

(Press Release) Birdie, the technology company that is revolutionizing how CPG brands do market research, today announced it has raised $1.6 million in a seed funding round led by ASTELLA, a Brazilian-based venture firm. The company plans to use the new funding to support Birdie’s expansion in the US, where the company plans to grow its sales and marketing teams, and accelerate the development of new features related to integration with other data sources.

Birdie is the industry’s first comprehensive AI-based Insights-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform designed specifically to help CPG brands understand millions of consumers’ opinions, transforming unstructured data into actionable insights. By using AI and natural language processing, Birdie turns millions of comments, reviews, and other online conversations into structured, practical consumer insights that help marketing teams make faster, more effective decisions. According to Gartner, 60% of Marketing Analytics teams will be cut by half until 2023 for failure to deliver insights in a more faster and efficient manner with many brands still using offline and expensive market research tools. Birdie’s powerful system of intelligence offers a critical tool for brands overwhelmed by the amount of data generated by consumers about their buying experiences.

“Our vision is to become a central system of intelligence for Consumer Insights executives and their teams. By consolidating data from enterprise marketing & data solutions — such as customer service, CRM, review management, research and surveys, and social listening tools — and external sources into a central dashboard with actionable insights, we are helping consumer brands tackle the problem of ‘infobesity’ — or information overload — to optimize marketing and sales efforts,” said Alexandre Hadade, Co-Founder and CEO, Birdie.

Hadade, named by CNBC as one of the 20 most innovative entrepreneurs in Latin America, founded Birdie in 2018 alongside Patrícia Osorio, Everton Cherman, and Rodrigo Pantigas fellow serial entrepreneurs from Brazil with backgrounds in marketing automation, e-commerce, and artificial intelligence. After completing Samsung’s startup accelerator program in Brazil in 2019, Birdie turned its attention to the US, where 44% of the Consumer Insights and Market Research spend reside.

Already, leading global consumer brands like Samsung and P&G are using Birdie’s platform to predict category trends, anticipate product crises, and discover promotional opportunities in key retail channels, a process that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated as brands are being forced to develop new sales channels or understand changing consumer behavior in existing channels.

“Birdie helped us review our current buying personas and allowed us to instantly discover new and untapped ones from the enormous amount of consumer data we collected. With their platform, Birdie allowed us to refine the messaging and positioning for some of our products, which significantly improved our campaigns’ conversion rates,” said Jairo Ramalho, Sr. Ecommerce and Data-Driven Marketing Manager for Samsung Latin America.

“In just five years the insights-as-a-service industry tripled to $3 billion in 2020, and within that, the consumer insights category spanning marketing, sales, customer success, and product management, is going to be a major driver of the market’s future growth. Birdie has built a powerful system of intelligence that we expect to become the cockpit for the next generation of leading consumer brands,” said Edson Rigonatti, partner at ASTELLA.

ABOUT BIRDIE:
Birdie is the AI-based Insights-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform that helps CPG brands extract actionable consumer insights from unstructured data to predict category trends, anticipate product crises, and discover promotional opportunities in key retail channels in real time. Developed in collaboration with industry-leading veterans of the CPG and AI technology worlds, Birdie offers brands a powerful new system of intelligence that puts valuable, but previously neglected, data to use. Today, Birdie works with some of the world’s leading brands like Samsung, P&G, Whirlpool.

Founded in 2018 by Alexandre Hadade and Patrícia Osorio, Birdie is headquartered in Palo Alto with offices in Miami and São Paulo and is backed by ASTELLA and private investors. For more information, visit Birdie.ai or follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

ABOUT ASTELLA:
ASTELLA is an early-stage Brazilian Venture Capital firm. Launched in 2010, the firm is currently investing its fourth fund, ASTELLA looks to back talented and daring tech entrepreneurs, and generate value-creating growth with new solutions and market categories that are changing the future of Brazil.