Typeform, the Barcelona, Spain-based startup that takes the heavy-lifting out of creating user-friendly surveys and other types of online forms, has raised a €550,000 seed round led by Berlin-based VC Point Nine Capital, and Warsaw’s RTAventures.
Founded by Robert Munoz and David Okuniev, and launched in Beta since April this year, Typeform’s service aims to make it easy to create device agnostic web forms. The emphasis is on not only making sure they look great and have a good User Experience, therefore increasing engagement, but, with the help of modern web standards, work across a range of devices, not least touchscreen phones and tablets. And it has to be said that the end results do look beautiful, going someway to dulling the pain of data entry.
“No one likes filling in forms/surveys, especially not on touch devices,” Typeform co-founder Okuniev tells TechCrunch. “When touch technology came in, mobile browsers had to build a layer to interpret HTML forms, which were never conceived for use in touch technology, resulting in a cumbersome experience.”
It was faced with this problem that Typeform’s founders set out to “re-invent the form from the ground up” by taking advantage of the latest browser technologies, including responsive design, Javascript, and CSS3, and building an easy-to-use tool for creating modern web forms. “The result is a form which renders beautifully across all platforms and devices, and draws the user in with its natural flow and ability to seamlessly include rich media and images,” says Okuniev.
Of course, Typeform isn’t the first or only service to take the heavy-lifting out of form creation. In the survey space, there’s the likes of SurveyMonkey, which hoovered up Wufoo to get in on the more general web form-building action, as well as a ton of similar services. But that isn’t stopping Typeform from having a go.
“The survey/form industry is literally teaming with players, every week I discover a new one. But everyone seems to be doing the same old thing,” claims Okuniev. Instead, he says that the Typeform team is bringing a fresh perspective to data collection, both on the form creation and form rendering side, and on the data collection side. “Perhaps it’s because were not marketeers or data analysts, we’re product people with a knack for UI & UX and we think answering questions online should be awesome!”, adds Okuniev.
In addition to its form building tool, Typeform has a 'Data API' that gives developers dynamic access to the data they’ve collected on the platform. Interestingly, it also plans to introduce a 'Build API' to let developers generate ‘typeforms’ via code without the need to go through the service’s authoring tool, thus form authoring can also be dynamic.
On how Typeform plans to make money, Okuniev says the service is currently free, but will add a subscription-based revenue model in the coming months. “We’ll be announcing our plans as soon as we’ve finished working them out,” he says in classic early-stage startup speak.
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