InvestmentMarTech

London-based ‘human intelligence platform’ Streetbees has closed a £30.7m ($40m) Series B round to accelerate the development of its technology.

The firm, which placed 10th on this year’s BusinessCloud London Tech 50, uses its 3.5m consumer app users, or ‘bees’ to help brands capture their emotion and context while engaging with brands.

Via a deep neural network, which analyse this unstructured data, the firm provides marketing insights to the likes of PepsiCo, Unilever and Procter and Gamble.

This latest round, led by Lakestar with participation from LocalGlobe, Atomico, GMG Ventures and Octopus, recognises the potential for Streetbees to address a global market estimated to be worth $300bn.

The Series B round will fund data acquisition across a variety of new verticals including Media & Entertainment and Finance.

Over the past 12 months, the London-headquartered firm reports a 150% revenue growth. With an office in Lisbon and a new office in North America, Streetbees said plans to increase headcount from 100 to 230 over the next 12 months.

Through COVID-19, Streetbees has worked with NGOs such as the NHS and the Red Cross to help interpret how potential fears and mental health have evolved.

“Human reality is incredibly complex, and while technology has made progress in healthcare and pharmaceuticals, we’re still no closer to truly understanding the decisions that we make. Our behaviour is captured online and in the artificial reality of social media, but the near 80 percent of our lives that happens in the offline world, remains untapped,” explains Tugce Bulut, CEO, Streetbees.

“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.”