Customers want to be heard. It’s a simple but universal truth, Ashwin Singhania recently told me over Zoom.
"Customers are hungry to share their voice," Singhania, cofounder of customer intelligence startup Unwrap, told Fortune. "They want to be heard, and they’re going to go and seek out whatever channel they can to share that feedback."
As it turns out, there are lots of places that people go to tell companies what they really think. You’ve got reviews, support tickets, surveys, sales calls, Slack, and communities across social media, from Facebook to Discord.
"Every customer that leaves a piece of feedback feels that their piece of feedback is the most important piece of feedback in the world," said Singhania. "So, they get frustrated when their feedback doesn't get listened to or doesn’t result in action."
The goal for Unwrap, founded by Singhania and Ryan Millner in 2022, is to make the deluge actionable. The company already counts among its customers Microsoft, Perplexity, Oura, and JetBlue. Unwrap has now also reached a new milestone, raising a $12 million Series A led by Scale Venture Partners, Fortune has exclusively learned. Atlassian Ventures, Cercano, ScOp VC, and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence participated in the round, along with ex-Stripe CTO David Singleton and Perplexity cofounder Johnny Ho. Per the deal, Scale partner Rory O’Driscoll will join Unwrap’s board.
Singhania and Millner first met working at startup Graphiq, which was acquired by Amazon in 2017. While product managers at Amazon Alexa, they both faced the same intractable problem: A flood of customer feedback from tens of millions of Alexa customers.
"The most frustrating part for us was that they were telling us what they wanted in plain English on different channels," said Millner. "They were leaving reviews online, and posting on Reddit. They were filing tens of thousands of support tickets every month, and we just couldn't listen to them. It wasn't because of a lack of desire or interest—we just didn't have the resources to comb through all of those sources."
Unwrap, in essence, uses AI natural language processing to solve this problem, analyzing massive amounts of customer data, turning that into practical ideas for improvement, rather than a misty torrent. Historically, much of that happened manually, and Millner knows firsthand what that process is like.
"It really came through a personal pain point of sitting there, manually reading Reddit, manually going through support tickets, thinking there had to be a better way, and then using this technology that we knew at Alexa to accomplish that task," said Millner.
Singhania and Millner paint a picture of the customer review world as a jungle, where you see all kinds of things you expect, and occasionally something entirely novel. I asked the two what the wildest piece of customer commentary they’d ever seen was.
Singhania cleared his throat, aware that he was about to astonish me: "So, we were pulling in all the mobile app feedback for Chipotle, right? And a customer wrote in, complaining that Chipotle would not take their entire burrito and blend it for them at the Chipotle restaurant, and carry it out as a smoothie."
Singhania gets it out with an SNL-worthy straight face before he, Millner, and I temporarily collapse in laughter.
What’s interesting about Unwrap ultimately is that they’re using AI to try to close space between companies and their customers, bridging a longstanding (and incredibly human) communication gap. It’s a corner of human nature I hadn’t thought about, and a small way in which everyone—despite the inherent friction in many customer critiques—is rowing in the same direction. A customer often takes the time to leave feedback because they wish the product was better, and no company sets out saying: "Yes, I’d love to create a terrible product that doesn’t give people what they want."
"The vision is filling the world with products people love, and bringing these two groups of people closer together," said Millner. "Who wouldn't want to live in a world where you could have products better adapted to what you want, and then be able to form a connection with the people building them? I think everyone would want that."
One day more…Our 17th annual confidence survey with Semaphore is underway—and it closes tomorrow. Fill it out, since it’ll take less than four minutes and your thoughts matter. Some preliminary results to one question: Should favorable tax treatment of carried interest income be eliminated? Right now, the yeses and nos are almost at a 50/50 split. Click here to take the survey.
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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