Alpha Raises $10M for its On-Demand Insights Platform That Helps Fortune 100 Companies Experiment Faster

NEW YORK, NY – May 30, 2018 – Alpha, the world’s first on-demand experimentation and user insights platform, today announced it has raised a $10 million Series A round led by Crosslink Capital and Calibrate Ventures, with additional participation from Spider Capital and Cendana Capital. This new round brings the company’s total funding to $15.5 million. The funding will be used to expand Alpha’s team and data science capabilities, building on its existing customer base at one-third of the Fortune 100, including NBCUniversal, Experian, and AARP.

Running experiments and making data-driven decisions about users, products, and new markets has long been a painstaking process, often done manually and at a pace that can’t keep up with the speed of agile development cycles. This has been especially crippling at the world’s largest enterprises, where the process can take months; much too slow in today’s real-time climate where companies like Amazon disrupt a different industry daily.

Due to limited oversight and an emphasis on iteration and agility, technology upstarts have taken over an unprecedented percentage of the Fortune 500, making it difficult for established organizations to keep up. Alpha is built to equip any company with the tools to think and act at the speed of startups, and for startups to expand into new markets. By investing in data science and artificial intelligence, Alpha enables management teams to turn plain-english questions into interactive prototypes and user insights in just days.

“The competitive advantage of the future is democratized decision-making,” said Alpha founder and CEO, Thor Ernstsson. “Our number one goal at Alpha is to equip those closest to the problem with the tools and data to make informed decisions. For major corporations with legacy processes and red tape, we are the ideal tool to seamlessly test and validate assumptions at scale, with no setup or costly infrastructure. We’re excited to use our new capital to help these companies become more agile, which is a key requirement for them to succeed in today’s market.”

Alpha integrates audience sourcing, prototype design, experiment templating, and analysis, reducing the cost of running these types of experiments by 90 percent while accelerating and automating 3-month workflows into 3-day workflows. The company’s access to a network of more than 100 million users enables businesses to gather actionable insights on diverse product challenges at unparalleled speed. Use cases include:

• D. E. Shaw, a multinational investment management firm, incubated an insure-tech startup with Alpha in order to validate a product offering 3x faster.
• A Fortune 100 financial services scaled their experimentation efforts 10x to enable hundreds of employees to collaborate and build products their users love.

"We’d be lost without Alpha. It pushes us to think harder about what consumers really want and why,” said Julie MacKinnon, Director of Strategy at AARP.

The company was founded by Thor Ernstsson, formerly a lead architect at Zynga and CTO of Audax Health, acquired by UnitedHealth in 2014.  

For more information about Alpha or to request a demo, please visit www.alphahq.com.

About Alpha

Alpha is a platform that enables management teams to make data-driven decisions about users, products, and new markets. By streamlining and integrating the process of audience sourcing, prototype design, research templating, and analysis into one end-to-end experimentation platform, Alpha accelerates traditional 3-month iteration cycles down to 3 days - allowing established companies to be as nimble as startups. Thanks to a pool of roughly 90 million users, Alpha has immediate access to targeted testing populations, enabling highly relevant feedback on diverse product, marketing, and innovation challenges.

Alpha is advancing the discipline of product management and has developed a massive community around its industry-leading resources, including the podcast, This is Product Management, the Medium publication, Product Management Insider, and the video interview library, Alpha Exec Series.

Founded in 2014, Alpha already serves nearly one-third of the Fortune 100. The company is backed by Crosslink Capital, Calibrate Ventures, Spider Capital, and Cendana Capital. For more information, please visit www.alphahq.com.

Contact Information

Kayla Abbassi

Account Manager

VSC for Alpha

kayla@vscpr.com