Fulcrum Equity Partners leads $15 million fundraise to accelerate
growth for leading AI insights platform
September 27, 2023 — For consumer brands, empathy—understanding how your customer feels and why they feel that way—is one of most critical sources of differentiation. In fact, Tillamook, the modern dairy brand, has conducted a study showing that their most loyal customers are 85% more likely to say the brand understands them (and these “loyalists” have a 5 times higher lifetime customer value). But with 80% of consumer feedback coming in the form of unstructured “experiential” data via consumer surveys, support chats & transcripts and online reviews, organizations don’t have an “operating system” for this data (as they do for “transactional” data within CRM and accounting systems).
According to Gartner, Inc., over 80% of brands are unable to analyze their unstructured feedback, largely because its so difficult to process and gain insights from and that the “the ability to analyze unstructured data is a key competitive advantage.”
That’s why we’re thrilled to share that Canvs AI has received a $15 million dollar investment led by Fulcrum Equity Partners to help accelerate the development, growth and adoption of our empathy operating system (OS), the Canvs AI Insights Platform. Additionally, Engage, an innovative corporate venture initiative from category-leading corporations like Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines, Cox Enterprises, Inspire Brands, and The Home Depot, also participated in the round.
Canvs AI’s mission is to enable empathy by putting the power of understanding consumers’ feelings in the hands of every business. Fortune 500 companies like CVS, Disney, Church & Dwight, ABInbev and Netflix use the Canvs AI Platform daily to analyze unstructured feedback from both consumers and employees. They report that their research productivity increases 20X while deepening their understanding of key stakeholders in their business.
The world’s leading companies have long understood the value of empathy to drive loyalty and boost customer lifetime value. However, most consumer feedback is trapped in noisy open-ended responses, fragmented and siloed across dozens of different sources. Canvs AI unlocks critical insights in unstructured feedback from virtually every source, using a combination of patented natural language algorithms and our newly released generative-AI co-pilot, AI Story Assist™, that presents users with an automated narrative about their data. Canvs AI has pioneerd the ability to investigate data with plain-language questions, and produce easily understood and quantifiable metrics into emotional reactions. Over the last year alone, Canvs has analyzed over 850 million pieces of open-ended text from surveys, social media and online comments on behalf of its brands.
Canvs AI is used across consumer research, insights, customer experience and employee feedback, including:
Tillamook uses Canvs AI across its insights work. In one study, the company analzed over 30,000 comments from consumer food diaries to identified the power of nostalgia in people’s relationship with food.
"Our most loyal customers are significantly more likely to say that Tillamook understands their needs, resulting in up to four times higher consumer value. Canvs AI has quickly become a critical part of how Tillamook achieves deeper consumer understanding by unlocking insights from open-ended text."
PODS analyzes tens of thousands of customer comments from their feedback surveys each year to understand the root causes of customer satisfaction and/or service issues.
"Canvs provides our ‘why’ behind the score better than other text analytic tools in the industry.”
National Geographic uses Canvs AI to help manage the iconic brand in a modern media landscape. In one application, they analyze comments from subscriber surveys to understand why customer are or are not renewing their subscription. These comments help National Geographic better understand their subscribers and how their subscribers relate to the brand.
"Canvs gives us insights about our subscribers and our brand that just wouldn’t otherwise be possible. It’s allowed us to very deftly navigate the brand through a complex media environment while being responsive to the market.”
Fandango uses Canvs AI to manage digital experience across its online brands, including the Fandango.com movie ticketing site, RottenTomatoes.com reviews and VUDU streaming service. In one project, Fandango collected open-ended feedback on site creative to identify the best-performing partner promotion.
"Canvs has allowed us to embrace open ends, which we traditionally did not do. It's given us a lot of great insights that we wouldn't have gotten otherwise."
We’re incredibly grateful to have the opportunity to support so many great insights leaders across some really amazing brands! This funding provides resources to accelerate product development and customer success operations, meaning we’ll be able to deliver even more value to these and other Canvs AI customers.
About Fulcrum
Fulcrum Equity Partners is an Atlanta-based growth equity firm that gives entrepreneurs the capital and hands-on support they need to take their companies further, faster. Fulcrum invests in healthcare services and B2B tech executives searching for $5 million to $30 million of equity in minority and majority growth opportunities. Fulcrum’s partners believe in building businesses the right way, meeting teams where they are, and helping them imagine a bigger and brighter future by building the right systems, processes, teams, and culture. All of that starts with the right experience, the right support, and the right relationship. Learn more at http://www.fulcrumep.com.
About Canvs AI
Canvs AI is the leading insights platform for transforming open-ended consumer feedback into actionable business intelligence using advanced, AI text analysis. Canvs is used by some of the world’s most admired brands to accelerate time-to-insights, reduce cost, and deepen their understanding of consumers. For more information or to request a customized demo, please visit https://canvs.ai or email sales@canvs.ai.
