Northstar Ventures lead £1.6m funding round into Wordnerds

December 18th 2024

Gateshead-based Wordnerds’ innovative AI customer insight analysis tool has gained the company £720,000 of investment from Northstar Ventures as part of a £1.6m a funding round.

Several well-known organisations such as Sainsbury’s, M&S, Network Rail and the Department for Work and Pensions are using Wordnerds’ product, which enables them to identify in real time how customers talk and what they talk about.

Large organisations are grappling daily with the task of understanding vast amounts of customer feedback from a myriad of sources such as customer surveys, emails, contact centre calls, forums and social media. Pulling together and making sense of that information is a herculean task which even the largest of companies struggle to deal with. Often businesses are left with mounds of data that contain valuable information, but which they are unable to fully utilise.

Wordnerds turns this data into actionable insights. It differentiates itself from other providers by integrating customized AI models into the product. By combining artificial intelligence and behavioural science, Wordnerds enables organisations to pool all the data to produce rapid, in-depth reports and dashboards directly into BI tools. Those reports enable companies to find the root cause of customer issues in real time and deal with the matter proactively, rather than having to deal with complaints after the event. Conversely, trends that are delighting customers can be rapidly spotted and the retailer is then primed to do more of what their customers love. The product is flexible and can be tailored for each client to offer a personalised service.

£720,000 of this investment comes from two of Northstar Ventures’ funds, with £160,000 from the Northstar EIS Growth Fund and £560,000 from the North East Innovation Fund, supported by the European Regional Development Fund. The remaining funds are from early-stage investors, Stephen Zinser and Leigh Cresswell, and a £521,000 grant from Innovate UK’s Future Economy Investor Partnership programme.

Tom O’Neill, investment manager, Northstar Ventures, said: “We are very pleased to be providing further investment into Wordnerds, including a commitment from the new Northstar EIS Growth Fund. The team at Wordnerds has developed a sophisticated, market leading AI-enabled product which provides rapid and incisive analysis to consumer facing businesses. They have an impressive list of customers and have grown significantly since our initial investment. This round of funding will help them to grow their commercial and product development teams, which will enable Wordnerds to scale at pace. We’re excited to work with the team on the next stage of their development.” 

Pete Daykin, CEO, Wordnerds said: “Northstar first invested in Wordnerds back in June 2019. They supported our team and our product through our first few years of rapid growth and have sustained us all along our journey with perspective and practical advice. As we enter a period of strong growth, we are excited to approach a new period of scaling with Northstar Ventures.
“We are also delighted to welcome new early-stage investors whose experience will be invaluable on the next leg of our journey. With some of the region´s keenest tech and software minds involved with the company at all levels we are confident we have created something remarkable at Wordnerds."