Today, I’m proud to announce that Maze has closed a $15M Series A funding round led by Emergence Capital with participation from Jay Simons (Former President at Atlassian) and existing investors Amplify Partners, Partech Partners, and Seedcamp.
Learn what this new funding round means for Maze’s next chapter.
A brief look at Maze’s early days
Here at Maze, we’ve been focused on making testing fast and easy since day one. Three years ago, Maze launched on Product Hunt as a testing tool for InVision prototypes, and ever since, we’ve been expanding the platform to offer more testing functionality. We’ve also added more integrations for the world’s best design tools, including Figma, Sketch, Marvel, and more recently, our integration for Adobe XD.
As a startup finding its foot in the design ecosystem, our primary focus for the first two years had been on enabling designers around the world to quickly get the insights they need to build great user experiences. As we’ve reflected on during our last funding round, designers have long been missing out on actionable data at the design stage simply because the process had been so burdensome for so long.
Just a few months after that round we launched Maze Discovery—a solution that enabled our users to test without a prototype and collect insights even earlier in their process. Soon after, we started noticing a trend. In addition to designers, more and more product managers, marketers, and researchers began joining their teams to collaborate on testing inside Maze projects, and most importantly, to run their own testing.
From then on, testing in Maze was no longer something only designers did. From product managers validating feature ideas to marketers sending out messaging surveys and designers and researchers testing user flows, wireframes, copy— entire product teams were placing everything they were building in front of users’ eyes.
That trend precipitated what came next. Internally, we began rethinking the role that Maze can play in helping everyone on the team get insights from users faster, and what it would take to accomplish that mission. Eventually, that work manifested in our repositioning from a prototyping testing tool to a rapid testing platform.
Both the changes we saw in the product and the work we did internally on identifying our positioning statement were the catalyst for Maze’s rebrand, as we wanted our brand and messaging to speak to this new, more mature vision.
Today, more than 50% of Maze projects are Maze Discovery projects pointing to a more in-depth, collaborative approach to building and testing products as companies increasingly see the value in getting input from users early and often throughout the product life cycle. We’re proud to say that Maze is now used by product and marketing teams at more than 40,000 companies around the world, including IBM, GE, Vodafone, Braze, and more. To date, more than 1 million test participants went through a Maze test at least once, and the Maze reports were seen more than 1.2 million times last year alone.
At the same time, over the last twelve months, we’ve not only expanded our platform but grew the team too. Being a fully remote organization since day one has allowed us to hire the most talented people in the world and continue growing our team throughout 2020. We’re proud to have a truly remote company with team members in more than 13 countries, including the United States, Spain, France, the UK, Poland, Moldova, Brazil, and more.
Rethinking the product build cycle
Since our first launch to the Product Hunt community, Maze has become a rapid testing platform that allows product and marketing teams to get input from users fast, early, and often during the process.
We’re excited about our mission to enable anyone to test and learn rapidly, as this is a central pain point in the way products are built today. As organizations strive to meet customers’ needs and deliver value consistently, the speed at which learning happens across product, design, and marketing teams is key.
We’re looking forward to seeing more organizations adopt a testing mindset, and to that end, developed a Rapid Testing Framework to help teams implement and train their testing muscle.
Rapidly testing user-facing experiences enables today’s modern, agile teams to get input from users at the earliest stage and iterate on the experience until it’s final. This improved process de-risks the product build cycle, helping to avoid costly reworks and allows the team to focus on valuable work.
We see testing expanding in the hands of all teams: data and insights will no longer be siloed in research departments but exist inside each customer-facing division. Ultimately, the future of testing is the democratization of testing so that everyone can test and learn rapidly.
How the funding will help us achieve our mission
With the resources to make our vision a reality faster, our focus is twofold: investing in the product and investing in the team.
Firstly, we’ll solidify our product foundations and hold true to our promise of offering a truly rapid testing platform. We’ll invest in performance, support, reliability, and delivery—and continue to work on the things that our customers find valuable.
We’ll start expanding Maze’s product offering for product marketers and product managers to deliver on our promise of making testing available for everyone. We’ll also invest more in collaboration as one of the main product themes for the year to enable product and marketing teams to work together on testing and user insights and make decisions fast.
Secondly, we’ll invest in our team and bring in the talent required to bring our mission to life. We’re working on setting our people up for success and setting the foundations for scaling our team while maintaining our culture and what makes Maze, the company, unique.
The Maze team
And that’s why for Maze’s next chapter, we’re excited to partner with Emergence Capital and angel investor Jay Simons, who brings years of expertise building Atlassian—one of the most successful product-led companies in the world. We’re also proud to have existing investors Amplify Partners, Partech Partners, and Seedcamp join the round and support us along the way, sharing our vision for the future of testing. All of these firms believe in democratizing testing inside organizations and making data and insights available in every team.
When the opportunity came up to partner with Emergence’s Jake Saper, it was immediately clear that it would be a great fit for Maze. Jake’s shared vision in making data and testing more accessible and collaborative had become apparent over twelve months and multiple conversations leading up to the raise. We’re excited about the opportunity to continue building this relationship over the next months.
The path to democratizing testing for everyone
Making testing available inside every team and across organizations is an exciting, challenging venture that we at Maze believe to be important. With the support of our amazing community of users, the Maze team, and our investors, I believe we’re in the best position to achieve our mission.
While we’re certainly at the start of a long road, I’m grateful and hopeful about what lies ahead and extremely grateful for everyone that supports us on our journey. If you’re interested in joining us—check out our careers page.
