Owings Mills, Md.-based Grotech Ventures has joined a $6 million seed funding round for Portland Ore.-based Sturdy.ai, a customer intelligence platform. The round was led by Seattle, Wash.-based Voyager Capital, with participation from Fortson VC. Voyager Capital’s general partner, Diane Fraiman, joined Sturdy’s board.
Sturdy integrates and analyzes unstructured customer interactions from emails, calls, support tickets, chats and other channels to discover consumer insights.
“We’re creating an AI-first intelligent interface for all things customer. This allows Sturdy to provide an almost magical understanding of every customer interaction across every data silo,” said co-founder and CEO Steve Hazelton, who previously founded two companies in the Bay Area. “This funding enables us to move faster to empower teams to stay ahead of risk and unlock new revenue opportunities.”
Hazelton calls Sturdy the “world’s first early warning system for your business,” saying it analyzes every customer conversation to identify risks before it’s too late. “The truth, is that it’s humanly impossible to catch every issue that harms your business. Sturdy was built to ensure nothing goes unnoticed, so the right team members can act in time,” he said on LinkedIn.
Sturdy plans to use the funds to deepen capabilities, expand integrations with customer data silos, and expand its go-to-market and engineering teams.
Founded in 1984, Grotech Ventures has more than $1 billion in committed capital, and has made over 150 portfolio investments, while completing 40-plus exits. It eyes opportunities to invest between $500,000 and $5 million in cybersecurity, fintech, supply chain, logistics and software startups.
Industry veteran Lawson DeVries has served as Grotech’s managing general partner since 2020. He has been closely associated with a number of Grotech portfolio companies that have been acquired, among others, by giants such as Cisco and Oracle. Starting his career with equity research at Deutsche Bank, DeVries later managed sales at Buckingham Research Group. He has a BA in English literature from Harvard University and an MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.
Grotech’s recent portfolio investments include EcoMap, Krista Software, Obol, pgEdge, and Eurofrigor. Its notable recent exits include Perishable Shipping Solutions, Urjanet and Youreka.
