Tribe attracts $7.5m from global investors as demand explodes for its community platform

• Investors: Global investors Bessemer Venture Partners and CRV lead investment round
• Platform: Tribe enables businesses to build a fully customizable customer community outside social media channels for deeper engagement 
• Growth: Tribe customers have grown 400% year on year as businesses from SaaS and technology sectors adopt a community-based engagement approach for their customers  
• Ambition: Funding to broaden Tribe platform with customizability and modular app ecosystem as they scale the business. 

 Tribe, a customisable community platform that enables businesses to create their customer communities has today announced a $7.5m seed funding round. It was led by Bessemer Venture Partners and CRV with participation from Inovia Capital. 

With Tribe, companies can create online communities to engage customers and followers. This helps to foster engagement and enables them to harness a valuable feedback loop to help enhance their product or service. Moreover, these communities empower customers to derive maximum value from the product, thereby improving customer retention and, ultimately, the revenue.

A growing number of SaaS players are turning to Tribe to build customer communities so they can get this pulse on customers, create a tight feedback loop, offer support, and enable knowledge sharing. Customer numbers at Tribe have soared 400% year-on-year since 2019 which includes businesses such as Pipedrive, ConvertKit, IBM, ASUS, Tim Hortons Foundation, and Prudential Financial. 

Tribe’s no-code community solution comes packaged with two components, a core platform and modular apps. The core platform solves the most complex parts of an online community that includes member management, feed, notifications, moderation, analytics, and security. Apps are installed on top of the core platform to extend functionality such as events, Q&A, ideation, voice chat, and messaging.

“We believe any business should be able to build something similar to Facebook, LinkedIn, or Clubhouse for their brand in a few clicks. Building an online community is less about technology and more about creating a network and sense of belonging. Still, many companies have to spend a tremendous amount of time handling the technology because the solutions out there are not customizable and extensible enough.” said Siavash Mahmoudian, Co-founder and CEO, Tribe. “At Tribe, we don’t just want to solve technical problems. We want businesses to learn best practices by action. A community manager with no coding knowledge should be able to bring up their community with Tribe in hours and not months.” 

According to Gartner Customer experience drives more than two-thirds of customer loyalty, outperforming brand and price combined. Forrester finds that companies driven by customer experience report 1.6x to 1.9x higher YoY growth in customer retention, repeat purchase rates, and customer lifetime value than other companies. 

Fundamentally, customer experience starts from creating an open platform that gives voice to customers. It enables customers to share feedback and helps companies to listen to customers. Based on the inputs, suggestions, and insights derived from the community, brands can make impactful business changes and improve customer experience.

“Tribe is building a flexible and highly customizable platform for communities, making it one-click easy for individuals and enterprises to spin up community sites for their fans and customers,” said Ethan Kurzweil, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. “Siavash is the very definition of product-centric, and his vision for bringing a community platform to the far reaches of the internet in an integrated way resonated highly with me. I’m excited to be part of the Tribe team.”

“Community has always been central to Siavash, Mo, and Soheil – and there is no better team to take on the momentous task of building the right tools to empower those who are building and joining communities at large,” shared Anna Khan, General Partner at CRV. “The Tribe team has accomplished so much in a short period of time, and I am thrilled to join them on this incredible journey.”

Tribe was founded in 2018 in Toronto, Canada by Siavash Mahmoudian, Soheil Alavi, and Mohsen Malayeri, who migrated to Canada from Iran with a shared vision of enabling brands to build thriving online communities. The company is now powering thousands of active communities in SaaS, consumer online service, and retail in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.