Investment Notes: Adora Seed

We’re proud to announce that Blackbird has led a US$7M Seed round into Adora alongside Skip Capital, Designer Fund, Garuda Ventures, and Co Ventures. We were also joined in the round by angels from Canva, Notion, and Linktree.

‍Adora provides software companies with a bird’s-eye view of their product in production. For the first time, companies can have their entire product mapped, overlaid with analytics, replays and AI insights to surface product issues and opportunities.

A partnership with exceptional people

At Blackbird, we exist to partner with product-obsessed founders like Omar Salem (CEO) and Nathan Scully (CTO). Omar brings a rare combination of world-class product growth skills and product imagination. We were lucky to witness Omar’s work up close in his most recent role as Head of Product Growth at Canva. Nathan is an engineer who has built and led engineering teams at OneFlare, and Amazon,.‍

Together, they’ve felt the journey mapping pain firsthand for over a decade and are now building the product that “we wished our teams had”.

Journey mapping‍

Product is the language of a software company.

If teams understand the existing product, they can build new products that more people love, quicker.

But surprisingly, there is no product visualisation tool for software companies to understand their end-to-end product experience.

If a company builds a pair of headphones - anyone can pick them up, try them on, and touch and feel the build quality. Software is a product too… but it is difficult to ‘touch and feel’. The product changes constantly… thousands of different flows exist… and often behind a login. The crazy thing about building a software product is that very few people inside a company know what the whole product does. 

This Brian Chesky tweetstorm tells the story:

The fact that Brian even bothered to let people know he created the ‘blueprint’ gives you a sense of how difficult journey mapping is for companies.

Not only is it difficult to visualise user journeys, but it’s also challenging to map user insights to the live product because they are often lost in SaaS tools and silos, such as Figma, Amplitude, Salesforce, and Intercom.

Every software company, including the greats like Airbnb, struggle to understand how one product component feeds into the next.

With Adora, teams can now see every language, device, cohort and experiment in one place.

Product love

Adora’s visual journey map is the solution to a universal problem.

But of everything we’ve seen from Adora, watching customers react to the product has been the most special.

Albert Cheng, Chief Growth Officer at Chess.com said, “Each year, tens of millions of people sign up to learn and play chess across multiple languages and user journeys. Adora has given us real-time visibility into these flows, uncovering meaningful opportunities to reduce friction for our users.”

Another customer, Sean King (Head of Design at iVisa) said, “The number one value that Adora brings to our team that other platforms can't is that it has dramatically simplified how long it takes to uncover insights that will have a meaningful impact."

Adora is uncovering previously unidentified product issues on autopilot, and now counts companies like Canva, Granola, Replit, Linktree and Notion as customers.

In the years to come, Adora hopes to become the category-defining company for software companies to understand and improve their product.

We are so thrilled to be joining them on this journey.

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Max & Nick, on behalf of Blackbird

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