London-based Streetbees raises €34M to fund data acquisition; decodes mood of pandemic-wary consumers

Even in the current internet era, it is claimed that 80% of the human decisions are made offline. In order to make the offline world more visible and searchable, Streetbees indexes its proprietary dataset of millions of offline moments similar to how Google indexes the online world. With its own community of 3.5 million consumers capturing emotion and context ‘in the moment’ when they engage with brands, Streetbees uncovers growth opportunities by applying deep neural networks to analyse this unstructured data.

Bags €34M funding

In a recent development, Streetbees announced that it bagged $40M (nearly €34M) Series B funding led by Lakestar, along with participation from Latitude, Atomico, GMG Ventures, and Octopus. The investment will be used to accelerate the development of the world’s first human intelligence platform, claims the company.

The funding round lets Streetbees to fund data acquisition across a variety of new verticals including media, entertainment, and finance. This will unlock new sales opportunities that are significant for the company. Streetbees has its headquarters in London and operates with an office in Lisbon and a new office in North America. Besides this, it also plans to increase its team from 100 to 230 over the next year.

Tugce Bulut, CEO, Streetbees says, “Streetbees is building the world’s first human intelligence platform with a completely proprietary dataset to index these offline moments in consumers’ own words. With this round of funding, we will accelerate the creation of a searchable world where brands can finally decipher human behaviour and decode the real reasons why consumers do what they do.”

Data mining bees

According to the company, Streetbees reveals how people behave, and why, by analysing real-life moments collected from its own global community. Over 3.5 million users – or ‘bees’ – across 190 countries worldwide use the chat-style Streetbees app to share moments from their daily lives via videos, photos and text. Through applying natural language processing technology to the results, Streetbees claims to uncover not just what they do, but also why they do it, and what drives them – and predicts what they may do next.

Significant role during pandemic

Streetbees was established in 2015 by Tugce Bulut and Oliver May in London. According to the company, it helped national health services and NGOs such as the NHS and the Red Cross during the COVID-19 crisis. It allowed them to understand how consumers’ fears and mental health have been evolving through the pandemic.

The company also released a public facing Mood of the World platform, which provides a real-time view of consumer emotions across 50 markets.

The company partners with world-leading brands across the consumer goods, media and entertainment, retail & insurance sectors. It’s clients include Unilever, PepsiCo, Sony Pictures, Carlsburg, Santander, Ikea, Vodafone, and L’Oreal.

As per the company, Over the past 12 months, Streetbees has achieved 150% revenue growth and reached a critical mass of proprietary data in the consumer goods space letting brands to access a searchable database, which is rich enough to answer their questions.

Streetbees has its headquarters in London and operates with an office in Lisbon and a new office in North America. Besides this, it also plans to increase its team size from 100 to 230, over the next 12 months.

Main image picture credits: Streetbees