We at Speciale Invest are thrilled to lead a $1M pre-seed round in Looppanel and partner with the team in their mission to declutter User Research & power great products. The round also saw participation from other marquee investors — Sequoia Spark & several angel investors in the Product & Design ecosystem.

As the world increasingly adopts software via product-led growth, we have observed a rise in demand for well-designed, user-centric products. Companies that fail to understand their customers deeply often end up spending billions of dollars only to release products that fall short of customer expectations. We have observed this trend even amongst our portfolio companies.

At the same time, the competitive nature of the SaaS space has pushed product companies to shrink their development cycles and provide value to their customers faster. Product & design teams are pushed to take make-or-break decisions in a matter of hours, making speed to insight essential.

“As they say software is eating the world and we think design is eating software (code)”

The very same teams that must make crucial decisions in a matter of hours, take weeks to run effective User Research. Instead of having actionable insights to work with, they’re swimming in raw data: hours of video, audio, images, and text files from hundreds of user interviews. As a result, many default to making decisions on a hunch — at the potential cost of building the wrong feature altogether.

With this strong conviction on the problem statement, we met Kritika & Akash, who had a front-row seat at Atlan — a product loved by customers. During their time at Atlan, Kritika struggled to run User Research at the speed needed by the organization, often spending days converting unstructured conversation data into actionable insights. On the engineering side, Akash struggled to maintain his understanding of users’ needs & context without any good way to consume the insights being generated. They quickly realized that the process of making product decisions was broken and that making the wrong decision comes with a very high cost. Conversations around their pain points and potential solutions naturally evolved into a partnership to build Looppanel.

We’re impressed with their knowledge of the space, how they have immersed themselves in their customers’ needs, and the vision for where they want to take Looppanel. Furthermore, they are gritty, thoughtful, open-minded and deeply passionate about serving their customer base.

With Looppanel, Product, Design, & Research teams can store user research data in one place, analyze the qualitative data to discover patterns and insights, and share research findings with the rest of the organization. It enables teams to ship the right features by validating hypotheses, testing solutions early and align on product decisions in a user-data-driven manner. It also deeply integrates with the product stack to provide an interface for the teams to gain a unified view of the customer insights and take action accordingly. Looppanel is loved by strong customer-centric teams across PandaDoc, Growens, Step, and many others.

We’re excited about the road ahead for Looppanel and believe the Looppanel team have the vision and customer empathy to democratize User Research going forward.

Looppanel is hiring! Check out open positions here‍