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NextView’s Investment in Riley: Supercharging Customer Discovery
When my friend Dave Lu of Hyphen Capital introduced me to Claudia Natasia last summer, I was immediately impressed not only with her deep expertise in product strategy but also by how she had organically built a community of hundreds of product leaders who were essentially asking her to build Riley. In a world where most startups struggle to find their first users, Claudia cultivated authentic relationships through her thought leadership and meaningful conversations about the challenges of product discovery long before writing a single line of code. We at NextView are proud to announce our investment in Riley, a personalized product insights assistant powered by adaptive AI that helps businesses make more impactful decisions with their data.
The story behind Riley and its community-first approach speaks volumes about the problem it’s solving. Product teams are drowning in data – customer interviews, usage analytics, support tickets, and research studies – yet they struggle to transform this scattered information into actionable strategies. Not satisfied with the traditional approach of manually piecing together insights across siloed tools, which often means missing critical opportunities to serve customers better, Claudia began building data science algorithms to combine and prioritize insights automatically. This innovative solution, which was proven successful in her previous roles, piqued the interest of hundreds of product, research, and insights leaders at conferences, leading them to ask her to build similar models for them. And that’s how Riley was born.
Riley tackles the massive data fragmentation challenge head-on by using adaptive AI to automatically analyze and connect insights across various data sources, helping teams make faster, more informed product decisions. Behind Riley are co-founders Claudia and Kevin Ma, who bring complementary strengths from working together at their previous company. Claudia’s experience leading product, strategy, and data science teams, which drove product strategies that resulted in triple-digit growth and a successful international acquisition, aligns perfectly with Kevin’s technical expertise in developing AI products and attribution models at HubSpot.
The timing for Riley couldn’t be better. As companies face increasing pressure to make data-driven decisions, the old way of manually connecting insights across tools just isn’t sustainable. Riley’s approach, combining adaptive AI with deep product strategy expertise that is customized to and learns with your business, represents the next evolution in how teams will discover and validate opportunities.
Today, we’re excited to share Riley’s launch from stealth and $3M Seed, which includes us at NextView, Vertex Ventures, Hyphen Capital, and exceptional product leaders as angel investors, including Edith Harbaugh, Co-Founder of LaunchDarkly, and Matt Doka, Co-Founder of Fivestars. We are thrilled to partner with Claudia, Kevin, and the Riley team as they help companies transform how they make product decisions.
If you’re interested in learning more about Riley, visit askriley.io.
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