Natter raises $23M to replace enterprise surveys with AI video interviews at scale

Natter raises $23M to replace enterprise surveys

The London-based startup, founded by former BBC and Uber executives, runs AI-orchestrated video conversations that can gather structured insight from thousands of employees simultaneously. A seven-minute conversation produces more than 1,000 words of data versus ten from a typical survey answer. Natter, a London-based enterprise insights startup, has raised a $23 million Series A led by Renegade Partners. The round was confirmed to Axios Pro by co-founder and CEO Charlie Woodward, a former head of commercial partnerships at the BBC and business development executive at Uber. The company expects to triple its headcount by the end of 2026. Prior investors include Asymmetric Capital Partners, Kindred Capital, Rackhouse Venture Capital, and Village Global, who collectively put in $10.5 million across earlier rounds. Natter's product is built around a simple structural argument: surveys are cheap to run but produce shallow data, while focus groups are richer but limited in scale, and both are slow. The platform replaces both with AI-moderated video conversations, designed to run across an entire workforce simultaneously. Participants join a session, are guided through structured prompts, and respond via video. An AI orchestration layer then processes every conversation in parallel, identifying themes, sentiment, and priorities and returning a summary of findings within hours. The company says a seven-minute conversation yields more than 1,000 words of usable data, compared with around ten words from a typical survey response. The platform can accommodate between one and 20,000 participants in a single session and supports both live and on-demand formats. There is no software to install; participants join via a browser link. Natter holds ISO 27001 certification and is compliant with GDPR, UK GDPR, and the EU AI Act. The system redacts personally identifiable information at the point of transcription, which the company says creates a psychologically safe environment for honest feedback. Use cases the company highlights include employee engagement, strategic planning workshops, product user research, sales coaching assessment, and training effectiveness measurement. The positioning is squarely against the large employee survey platforms, and against the long cycle times those tools typically require. What used to take months through surveys, interviews, and analysis is the timeframe Natter is targeting for compression into hours, according to the Axios Pro report. Natter was founded in 2021 and is based in London. The founding team, which also included executives from Google, Salesforce, and Deloitte, launched with a $1 million pre-seed round and initially focused on what it described as a virtual watercooler, a tool for facilitating spontaneous social conversations in hybrid and remote teams. The product has since pivoted toward enterprise insight gathering at scale, with the AI moderation and analysis layer as its core differentiator.

Natter lands $23M to encourage employees to open up about their organizations through AI video interviews - SiliconANGLE

Natter lands $23M to encourage employees to open up about their organizations through AI video interviews Conversation intelligence startup Natter said today it has raised $23 million in funding to replace the traditional surveys and focus groups used by organizations to obtain insights from their employees. The round was led by Renegade Partners and saw participation from Kindred Capital, Costanoa Ventures, Rackhouse Ventures, Village Global and Asymmetric Capital Partners, plus a number of angel investors. Natter, officially known as Tenth Chapter Ltd., has built an artificial intelligence-based system that enables organizations to interview their employees at scale. Its goal is to capture the sentiments of employees, team members and customers at scale in order to generate useful insights that can inform strategies around sales, corporate policies and elsewhere, the company explained. By interviewing thousands of employees simultaneously, Natter says it's able to capture insights at a speed and depth that far surpasses traditional techniques for generating feedback, such as surveys and research interviews. Co-founder and CEO Charlie Woodward said that every person inside an organization has something important to say about it, and believes that leaders need to hear it. "The response from organizations like Accenture, ServiceNow and Philip Morris has shown us just how urgent that need is," he added. Natter's internal research shows that AI-generated insights from conversations outperform interviews, surveys and focus groups by a wide distance. For instance, one customer reported that just 40 minutes of conversations yielded more insights than 500 hours of research interviews. At the same time, it uncovered between 97% and 147% more themes than focus groups, surfacing issues inside the organization that its leaders were totally unaware of. Woodward explained that one of the reasons for this is that employees generally feel "more psychologically safe" sharing their candid opinions of an organization when engaging with in conversation with AI. In official interviews where they sit face-to-face with a senior staff member, employees may be less willing to speak up about certain issues that affect them, for a variety of reasons, but when they're chatting with AI, they're much more comfortable discussing sensitive topics. That's because the startup takes privacy very seriously, and reassures every employee that their opinions will remain anonymous, so there's no risk of getting into trouble for complaining or moaning about something. Accenture Plc Head of Talent Stephen Wroblewski summed up Natter's capabilities, likening it to being able to talk to 10,000 people in a single day. "That's why we need Natter, so we don't have to spend weeks and months running hundreds of interviews and focus groups, and then spend even longer reviewing the different comments and transcripts to understand what matters," he said. The breadth of insights Natter delivers through conversation intelligence has gotten the attention of a growing number of organizations, sparking rapid growth for the startup. In 2024, it was able to grow its revenue by four times, and the year after it increased by five times, both off undisclosed bases. The growth was driven by its expansion into the U.S. According to Natter, 80% of its customers are now based in the U.S., which is why it recently relocated its headquarters from London to New York City. Going forward, the company hopes to accelerate its momentum, using the funds from today's round to expand its engineering, data and product teams. Renegade Partners co-founder and Managing Director Renata Quintini said employees have struggled to make their voices heard through outdated surveys and research. "Natter's purpose-built infrastructure for real-time video capture and its unmatched longitudinal dataset creates AI-native, defensible insights where companies urgently need them, across sales, strategy and HR," she said. "It's poised to redefine how enterprises listen, learn and act."