Quality is the only way to win — Creandum backs unitQ.
History tells the tale of many classic battles such as the battle of Waterloo between the British and French. In modern days, and with fewer human casualties there are some other well-remembered battles. Hipchat vs Slack, Tidal vs Spotify, and GoToMeeting vs Zoom are a few examples. We all know who won each one of them. So what’s the common denominator between the winner? The answer is quality!
This is obviously a somewhat a simplification of things, but in a competitive market over the longterm, quality is the only true differentiator for a business. Product quality is what makes companies 🏆 or 💀.
As investors and entrepreneurs, at Creandum, we’re very aware of the importance of quality. This is why we are exceptionally happy today to tell the world about unitQ — a company we’ve been working with for some time.
Quality is obvious but difficult.
Building a great product that works well and that customers love is a difficult task. Christian and Niklas knew this very well already before founding unitQ. Back in the days of 2007, they built a consumer app called Skout from the ground up. They got an impressive amount of users, raised some 💰from a16z, and finally sold the business in 2016. During this journey, they spent a lot of time finding, reporting and fixing bugs. A key insight they gained was to listen very attentively to your end-users. This sounds super cliché, but first of all, it is true, and secondly, this is more difficult than you may imagine. What Christian and Niklas spent endless hours on was manually reading through reviews and what people were saying about Skout online, and then trying to relay relevant insights back into product and engineering.
After they sold their company in 2016, Christian and Niklas not only understood the fundamental importance of quality for products, but they also had learned a lot of techniques to improve quality efficiently. That’s when they realized that they needed to share this knowledge with other people, and that’s why they founded unitQ.
Whilst quality monitoring has existed for a long time, extracting meaningful human data around quality, experience and engagement has never been possible in the past. But unitQ’s unique NLP engine enables them to extract relevant data from unstructured human information. This gives any product-centric organization a way to automate continuous product quality monitoring across platforms, devices, and languages, and seamlessly integrate the output of such monitoring into the product roadmap.
The company has operated in stealth while working with a range of top global consumer apps, and today we’re super proud to announce that unitQ has secured an $11m Series A led by Google’s AI-focused venture fund Gradient Ventures. We couldn’t be more proud of Creandum having the opportunity of being the company’s first backer some time ago already, and we’re looking forward to continuing to work with David, Nicklas, and Christian as they scale this business while helping companies win through improved quality. 📈
