Long before walking across the Georgia Tech graduation stage this spring, the team behind Tabnam had job offers from some of the most high-profile global tech companies. That is a dream situation for most computer science students…but Daksh Gupta and Soohoon Choi had a different vision for how they wanted to start off their professional careers.
They turned down job offers and are instead continuing their entrepreneurial journey with Tabnam, a new type of feedback collection platform.
Getting accurate customer satisfaction is a problem for brands of all sizes, but the team behind Tabnam thinks they have a way to increase responsiveness in the digital world.
“Forms are a terrible way to get feedback from the customers because they have very low submission rates,” Gupta told Hypepotamus. “And while in the rest of the world it’s an incentive problem, it’s uniquely different in America. In America, people love sharing their opinions on products and services.”
Using this thesis, Tabnam is taking on giants in the feedback world, like Qualtrics and Surveymonkey, with their AI-powered platform. The startup uses text messages or WhatsApp to collect customer conversations, something the Tabnam team says has proven to increase response rates for their early customers.
After that, Tabnam’s AI gets to work digesting that information and turning it into actionable data. GPT (generative pre-trained transformer) lets Tabnam’s chatbot “understand and respond to customer feedback with remarkable accuracy and contextual relevance,” according to a release from the startup.
That can help brands understand what customers are unhappy with, what is going well during an onboarding process, or better understand what they like about a new product, Gupta explained. He said that the startup’s target customers are “consumer-facing enterprise companies where their success is dependent on the quality of the customer satisfaction and our Net Promoter Score.”
Beyond customer satisfaction reporting, users can turn to Tabnam to conduct market research, make roadmap prioritization decisions, monitor quality assurance, or check in on progress towards product-market fit.
Keeping Tabs On Tabnam’s Growth
The team started working on the Tabnam concept in college – first in an entrepreneurial-focused class and then through Georgia Tech’s Create-X program. It was a finalist for the 2022 InVenture Prize, an undergraduate pitch competition hosted on campus each year.
Now in 2023, the team has pulled in an impressive list of heavy-hitting local investors – representing both the tech and the consumer brand side – for its pre-seed round.
Tabnam recently closed a $800,000 pre-seed from Drive Capital, Tristan Walker, and Chris Klaus.
Klaus, co-founder of Internet Security Systems (NASDAQ:ISSX, acq. IBM for $2B), is a prolific investor in Georgia Tech startups. Tristan Walker founded Walker & Company (acquired by P&G) and was an early employee at Twitter and FourSquare.
This is the first investment out of Atlanta for Drive Capital, a $80 million seed stage fund out of Ohio.
Avoilan Bingham, Drive Capital’s Atlanta-based General Manager, told Hypepotamus that the firm was drawn to Tabnam because the team is “solving a big problem in the customer survey/review space with an intuitive and customer-focused use of AI.”
Want to follow along with Tabnam’s journey after the pre-seed investment?
Here are some important links: