Maze raises $15M Series A to democratize user testing for the whole team

Maze is the highest-rated platform for user testing and the second most-used, only after Zoom. 

February 25, 2021— Maze, the leading rapid testing platform, today announced the close of a $15 million Series A. The round was led by Emergence Capital, with participation from Jay Simons (Former President at Atlassian) and existing investors Amplify Partners, Partech & Seedcamp. Maze empowers product and marketing teams to collect actionable user insights they can act on instantly by integrating seamlessly with critical workflows. The funding will be used to more than double the product team and accelerate the company’s mission to empower anyone to test and learn rapidly. 

According to the Design Tools Survey, more than 70% of companies are not using testing tools for user testing. Instead, they rely on a lengthy and expensive undertaking involving 1x1 interviews. Maze's Co-Founders experienced this first hand while working on their previous startup, Pingg, a messaging app for gamers. Like many startups, they had a waiting list of 2,000 people willing to test their prototype—and yet no platform to easily test their product idea at scale.  

“Competition is fierce and companies are under immense pressure to launch, but bypassing user testing can be a detrimental mistake. We created Maze to take the guesswork out of building digital products,” said Maze Founder and CEO Jonathan Widawski. “Maze enables anyone—from marketers to designers to product managers—to test anything from prototypes to copy and concepts with real users in hours instead of days. Maze gives teams quantifiable insights and meaningful data that they can act on instantly.” 

Maze is democratizing access to testing, freeing companies to completely reimagine and dramatically improve the way products are built. Expanding beyond the traditional researcher, Maze now empowers Product and Marketing with the ability to collect actionable insights and get validation for data-informed decisions in hours—even before the prototyping phase.  

“Maze has been working on bringing the user's voice back to the design process,” said Maze Co-Founder Thomas Mary. “By empowering everyone in an organization to source and access invaluable user insights, we've changed the way teams approach user testing and research from ‘something expensive and time-consuming’ to something that's run on every sprint. We believe in the unstoppable power of design-led companies.” 

In the past 12 months, Maze has seen immense growth: 

• 600% MRR growth in 2020  
• 3x signup/user growth 
• 300% corporate customer growth 
• One million testers have completed at least one maze 
• According to the 2020 UX Design Tools survey, Maze is now the second most highly-rated platform for user testing in the world; only second to Zoom.

“In a world in which hybrid and remote work are the new normal, it’s no longer acceptable for collaboration and productivity to take place in separate tools,” said Jake Saper, Emergence General Partner. “The future of work will rely on Deep Collaboration tools like Maze that enable employees across an organization to collaborate on important tasks like user testing in one place. We’re excited for Maze to join the Emergence family.”   

Maze’s corporate customers range from GE, Samsung, and Vodafone to fast-growth startups including Braze and FairMoney. The diversity in size and needs is a testament to the platform’s fast, remote testing for every asset and idea at scale. 

The company’s formal partnerships include Figma, InVision, Marvel, Sketch. Maze also offers a plug-in for Adobe’s UI/UX Design & Collaboration tool, Adobe XD. In addition, Maze was selected out of more than 500 applicants to receive one of five spots in Reforge's first Partner Program cohort.  

Maze is a fully remote team with employees in 15 countries, including the United States, Brazil, France, UK, Spain, South Africa, and the Philippines. Emergence’s Saper is joining the Maze Board of Directors and former Atlassian President Jay Simons joins Maze as a New Business Angel. Maze also has an extensive, hands-on advisory network, including current and former executives at New Relic, Slack, Facebook, SurveyMonkey, InVision, and Miro.  

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About Maze 

Maze is the leading rapid testing platform that empowers agile teams to test, learn and act, rapidly. Product and marketing teams can test user-facing experiences remotely and collaboratively—and see their results transform into actionable, quantifiable data, in a matter of hours not days. With Maze, teams can test everything from prototypes, concepts, and copy, democratizing testing company-wide. For more information on Maze, visit www.maze.co and follow @mazedesignhq. 

Press Contact 

Bozena Pieniazek, bozena@maze.design

About Emergence  

Emergence is the leading venture capital firm focused on early-stage enterprise software companies. Its mission is to be the most important partner to the companies that are changing the way the world works. The firm's investments' current market capitalization is over $400B and includes companies such as Zoom (ZM), Veeva Systems (VEEV), Box (BOX), Bill.com (BILL), SuccessFactors (SFSF, acquired by SAP), Yammer (acquired by Microsoft), ServiceMax (acquired by GE), and Intacct (acquired by Sage). For more information on Emergence, visit www.emcap.com and follow @emergencecap. 

Press Contact 

Caitlin Regan, caitlin@emcap.com

About Partech 

Born in San Francisco and Paris, Partech is one of the most active VCs in the world. Its team of former entrepreneurs and tech operators from 20 nationalities brings together capital, operational experience and strategic support for entrepreneurs at seed, venture and growth stages. In 2020, Partech invested in 82 startups across 24 countries in Europe, America, Africa and Asia.

Press Contact 

Isabelle Tresson, itresson@partechpartners.com