unitQ, The Quality Company, Launches With $11m Series A To Help Squash Software Bugs

New Startup from Skout Cofounders Out of Beta, Backed by Gradient Ventures, Google's AI-focused Venture Fund

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Mar 03, 2020, 09:00 ET

SAN MATEO, Calif., March 3, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- unitQ, the real-time solution for staying on top of product quality across all platforms, languages and regions, today announces that it has raised $11M in Series A funding. This round was led by Gradient Ventures, Google's AI-focused venture fund, with participation from Creandum, XSeed Capital, Bragiel Brothers and BootstrapLabs. Anna Patterson, Managing Partner at Gradient Ventures, will join the board. With this new capital, unitQ plans to hire, invest in new and existing product development, and bring unitQ Monitor to a broader market as it launches out of beta.

unitQ founders Christian Wiklund, David Eklov and Niklas Lindstrom started the company in response to the lack of customer-informed bug prioritization platforms while building their previous company, Skout. They sold Skout to The Meet Group in 2016 and found that product quality was the single biggest lever to user growth and retention. The complexities of dealing with many platforms, languages and pressure to ship code frequently forced them to become experts in hyper-tuning conversion cycles. However, because there was no off-the-shelf solution, they decided to build one themselves. Their background in scaling complex, global consumer companies in competitive markets was fertile ground for starting unitQ.

unitQ is different from data monitoring companies such as DataDog and Splunk, because it analyzes human data instead of machine data. The company's first product, unitQ Monitor, ingests omni-channel user feedback in any language to identify, quantify, and prioritize product bugs. The turn-key solution provides enterprise clients with immediate time to value because data inputs come from existing customer bases and associated user data.

"When an engineering team develops a product, understanding which bugs to prioritize is one of the hardest challenges," said Anna Patterson, Gradient Ventures Managing Partner and Google VP of Engineering, who worked on Search pre and post Google's famed 2004 IPO. "unitQ aggregates real-time user data to do this, and also ranks bugs by their impact on customer satisfaction and business impact. This is a big leap for product development teams and the tech industry at large because it turns product quality into a science."

Early beta customers have already seen the impact on product quality by working with unitQ. "We realized that unitQ can turn our existing customer base into an extended quality team," said Greg Burch, VP Engineering at Styleseat. "Before unitQ, our product improvement prioritization started with a long meeting and many opinions. Now we look at unitQ Monitor and immediately start doing what we're good at: building a great product."

Data from unitQ Monitor has already improved quality for products used by hundreds of millions of users from category leading companies. unitQ Monitor presents indisputable data on what bugs to fix next and increases user retention, decreases support ticket volumes, and aligns organizations on company priorities. During a short beta period, unitQ has identified 3,500 unique bugs in 5.6M pieces of customer feedback data. On average, customers increased the quality of their products with 20% less bugs reported within 30 days of adopting unitQ.

"We're thrilled to partner with the team at Gradient Ventures in our mission to help companies monitor and improve product quality. The positive feedback that we've already received from our customers shows that unitQ directly increases retention of their users and provides a powerful edge against the competition," said Christian Wiklund, CEO and cofounder of unitQ.

About unitQ
unitQ was founded in 2018 by ex-Skout founders Christian Wiklund, Niklas Lindstrom and David Eklov, veterans in scaling complex, global consumer companies in competitive markets. unitQ is the real-time solution for product and engineering teams to stay on top of product quality across all platforms, languages and regions. The inspiration for unitQ came when the founders found that product quality was the single biggest lever to user growth and retention while building their previous company. Based in San Mateo, unitQ has raised $11 million in capital and is backed by Google's AI-focused venture fund. For more information, visit: https://www.unitq.com/

About Gradient Ventures
Gradient Ventures is Google's AI-focused venture fund - investing in and connecting early-stage startups with Google's resources, innovation, and technical leadership in artificial intelligence. The fund focuses on helping founders navigate the challenges in developing new technology products, allowing companies to take advantage of the latest techniques so that great ideas can come to life. Gradient was founded in 2017 and is based in Palo Alto, California. For more information, visit www.gradient.com.

SOURCE unitQ