Zappi Raises $170M from Sumeru Equity Partners to Digitize Enterprise Market Research

The leading consumer insights platform closes largest funding round in company history to empower enterprise creators with agile market research.

Zappi, the leading consumer insights platform designed for creators, announced it has raised $170 million in growth capital from Sumeru Equity Partners (“Sumeru”) and co-investors.

This strategic investment from Sumeru follows several years of strong momentum for Zappi and expansion of its team to over 300 people in 13 countries. Founded in 2012 by market research industry veterans, Zappi works with over 350 global enterprises, including PepsiCo, McDonald’s, Heineken®, and Reckitt, to bring pre-launch consumer insights to every phase of their creation processes.

Zappi offers creators AI-powered research software that returns impactful results in hours–not weeks. The platform allows creators to compare studies against 1.2 billion historical data points to validate, inspire, and optimize their best ideas before going to market. With the help of Zappi, insights leaders can accelerate innovation pipelines and bring new ideas to market faster.

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“Zappi has a bold vision for the future: we want to digitize consumer insights for every enterprise,” said Steve Phillips, CEO and co-founder of Zappi. “Today, only 3% of the market research industry is digitized. The other 97% is controlled by service-based incumbents that are slow, expensive, analog, and don’t fit the needs of creators. We’re driving innovation in the century-old industry with a platform that acts as a single source of truth for the modern enterprise, where creators have the right insights at their fingertips to inform every decision. Sumeru’s experience in high-growth, innovative SaaS businesses and commitment to people and growth culture made them the perfect partner to help us achieve this ambitious vision.”

Sumeru provides growth capital, scaling partnership, and operating expertise to leading enterprise software companies. The firm partners with founders and management teams to scale their businesses by prioritizing organic growth levers in product leadership, go-to-market acceleration, and growth culture. Sumeru’s recently closed Fund IV–a $1.3 billion vehicle–is leading the investment in Zappi, and principals Sanjeet Mitra, George Kadifa and Sofija Ostojic are joining the Company’s board of directors.

“We see a world where every single company wants to know what its customers are thinking — driving tens of billions of annual spend on researching consumer insights,” said Mitra, Kadifa and Ostojic. “Zappi has reimagined the entire process by using innovative technology to empower enterprises to collaborate with customers in real-time, resulting in meaningful product and advertising decisions made more efficiently and thoughtfully. We are incredibly excited to partner with the Zappi team and are proud to invest in a company with culture and community impact at the center of its strategy.”

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This investment will accelerate Zappi’s position as the leading software platform for agile consumer insights. The Company intends to expand data sets across new markets, verticals and categories; power its platform innovation with emerging technologies–such as AI and natural language processing–to minimize the distance between analysis and action; and continue expanding its team globally with leading talent to make customers successful on the platform.

PepsiCo SVP and Chief Consumer Insights and Analytics Officer, Stephan Gans says: “Digitizing our core capabilities is at the heart of our strategy to deliver better and faster consumer-based decision making. Zappi has been a key partner for PepsiCo to deliver on this vision, most notably with advertising pre-testing tools that we’ve scaled to 100+ Insights professionals across the globe. Our collaboration with Zappi has demonstrated huge business impact and has raised the bar on creative effectiveness year-over-year, significantly improving the ROI on our media investment. We’re excited to continue to partner with Zappi to continue to raise the bar on creative and innovation excellence.”

“We started working with Zappi in 2018, to change the role of insights in our innovation development process. We wanted to get smarter, earlier in the process, to deploy McDonald’s development resources against ideas we knew were winners with a high probability of success,” said Matt Cahill, Senior Director, Head of Consumer Insights, McDonald’s USA. “We wanted the consumer to help make all our innovation better, rather than just offer a report card. Now, four years later, Zappi has been a true partner in helping us to achieve that vision, codify it into our process, and create a body of knowledge from which we are continually able to push ourselves to get better. And, that may be the best thing about them, not the speed, or accessibility, the expansion in the number of iterative tests we can run, but the vision, the way they challenge the way things are, and ask how to make them better. It’s a ride we are excited to continue.”

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