$1.75 million boost to new Kiwi company Thematic

Husband and wife business team Nathan Holmberg and Alyona Medelyan have gained $1.75 seed funding for their new company Thematic. Photo / supplied

Kiwi company Thematic has received additional $1.75 million in seed funding to add to its already impressive list of clients just six months after launching.

The company, which uses artificial intelligence to take the leg-work out of analysing survey data, was started by husband and wife team Alyona Medelyan and Nathan Holmberg.

They were recently accepted into one of the world's most exclusive startup accelerator programmes, Y Combinator, where they had the opportunity to pitch their business plan to Silicon Valley's biggest names.

The company today announced it had received $1.75m in seed funding, led by venture capital firm AirTree Ventures. The fledgling business also received an investment from Y Combinator as well as a number of individuals and San Francisco-based angel investors.

Thematic already has big-name customers in six countries including Vodafone, Air New Zealand, Stripe, Ableton and Manpower Group.

"The aim is to grow the business further globally. The business is investing in new engineering, sales and marketing staff to fuel its growth," the company said in a statement.

The founders now want to set up an office in the United States and start hiring sales people.

Thematic specialises in analysis of "free text" responses to targeted questions, which are the hardest to analyse.

"Our technology helps businesses to understand what their customers are saying at scale. It's one thing to collect an NPS [net promoter score], it's a whole different ball game to deeply understand the specific issues and themes driving that score," the statement said.

Thematic's technology enables clients to take into account written customer feedback --
the part of the survey that actually told companies what they were doing right and wrong.

Medelyan has a PHD in natural language processing and machine learning, while her husband and business partner, Holmberg, quit his job as chief architect for leading music software company Serato once the couple realised the technology's potential.