Chattanooga-based SwiftWing Ventures invests in Knoxville start-up Survature
By Tom Ballard, Director of Innovation and Entrepreneurial Initiatives, Pershing Yoakley & Associates, P.C.
There’s really good news for a Knoxville-based start-up thanks to another new entity out of Chattanooga named SwiftWing Ventures.
Survature Inc., a software company located in the University of Tennessee’s Business Incubator, has announced a $686,000 seed round funding investment from SwiftWing Ventures, a new Chattanooga venture capital firm.
Both companies have been the subject of previous posts on teknovation. Survature was one of the start-ups in “The TENN,” Launch Tennessee’s inaugural master accelerator program. More recently, the company conducted a readership survey for teknovation.
The company’s senior leadership team includes Jian Huang, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), and Steve Chin, Chief Product Officer.
SwiftWing Ventures was founded earlier this year to support early growth start-ups with demonstrated proof of concept and a scalable business model by providing investment capital and proactive operational and strategic support.
“We were immediately impressed by Jian and the team he has assembled at Survature,” said Ben Brown, CEO of SwiftWing. “Together, they’ve built an amazing product that goes way beyond traditional surveying and actually listens to respondents through intelligent data capture, analysis, and interpretation. With capital in place now, we’re excited to see Survature scale their operations and attack this market.”
Survature will use the proceeds to invest in marketing and sales while further developing its online survey platform and technology.
“How you say it is just as important as what you say,” Huang explained in describing Survature’s approach. The company’s surveys provide a set of interactive question types that dramatically shorten the time required to complete the survey while capturing survey takers’ behaviors.
“We take greatly increased quantities of traditional data, driven by higher completion rates, and enrich it with insights gained by how the survey was completed,” he added. “By capturing not only the final responses (the what) but also the order, timing, and placement of these responses (the how), Survature can determine the relative importance and other significant indicators for each response.”
Huang said Survature delivers strong metrics including survey completion rates that consistently run between 20 and 50 percent higher than the industry average. As a result, there are vastly improved analytics resulting from the additional capture of behavioral information.
The investment underscores the importance that SwiftWing places on building strong connections between Chattanooga and Knoxville.
