Ribbon raises £2.63m to change how companies do user and product research

• The platform lets user research and product teams rapidly validate ideas, test designs and new features and gather user feedback through its in-product video interview and survey tools which customers integrate through a simple one-time integration.
• The additional funding will help grow the Ribbon team and develop new products to streamline user research and product testing.

Ribbon, a startup building an in-product research platform to help user research and product teams understand their customers’ behavior and experiences, has raised £2.63m in seed stage funding. The round is led by Octopus Ventures with participation from earlier backers MMC Ventures and Concept Ventures. Angel investors also joining the seed include Matt Robinson (founder of GoCardless and Nested), Keith Grose (Head of UK at Plaid) Ross Sheil (SVP Global Revenue at Infogrid) and Felix Leuschner (Group Business Development Director at Cazoo).

Ribbon is a user research platform that provides an all-in-one place for user and product research teams to do research and product discovery with their users. Ribbon’s customers can run studies like video interviews and in-product surveys which are deployed to active users based on product interactions and user behaviors, enabling them to continuously undertake product research to validate product decisions and build better user experiences.

The company was born from frustration. Founder Axel Thomson, an earlier product manager at UK unicorn Gousto, realized there had to be a better way to include targeted feedback from real users into the product design and development process. He comments, “We would often talk about product decisions in terms of making ‘bets’. We just didn’t have the time or tooling to gather the data needed to make informed product decisions.”

Axel Thomson said, “By making it easy to speak with real customers directly in the customer journey through a simple one-time integration, researchers can make more informed product decision and build better products for their users.”

Karan Mehta, Investor at Octopus Ventures commented, “Ribbon is offering consumer facing companies a pioneering way of generating user feedback at scale. As investors we know the best companies are built on consumer demand and win in the long run by adapting to their users. Ribbon enables companies to gain this advantage by making it easy to continuously make better product decisions backed by targeted research.”