There are now over 30,000 Alexa skills, and many more will be added this year that take advantage of new Alexa capabilities and serve customers in new languages and locations around the world. Voice is an emerging user interface and building a great customer experience requires iteration and feedback. As such, voice developers are looking to help refine their skills through user testing. Finding testers at scale and being able to quickly analyze their feedback in a way that informs skill development, can be challenging, particularly if you are building for audiences in varied locations, languages, or with broad interests.

That is why we are pleased today to announce our follow-on investment in Pulse Labs, a scalable testing and analytical service that makes it easier for Alexa skill developers to vet their creations with users around the world. Pulse Labs combines live user testing and data analysis to provide developers with rich insights that inform how consumers want to interact with a skill, and the ability to see patterns across testing feedback.

We originally met the Pulse Labs founders, Abhishek Suthan, Dylan Zwick, and Akansha Mehta, in New York in Spring 2017 during the recruitment phase of our inaugural Alexa Accelerator, powered by Techstars. We were impressed by their backgrounds and their passion for helping Alexa skill builders, and were thrilled when they accepted our invitation to join the Alexa Accelerator program. They quit their day jobs and showed up in Seattle a few weeks later ready to begin the program and build their company.

“During the Alexa Accelerator program, our founding team worked with Alexa teams to build and improve our service to prepare it for a broader roll out. Pulse Labs has helped developers manage user testing and launch Alexa skills for more than 20 brands,” said Abhishek Suthan, co-founder and CEO of Pulse Labs. “We are thrilled to build on this success and continue our relationship with Amazon – we look forward to scaling our service for Alexa developers and brands globally.”

Our investment is made alongside Madrona Venture Group, Bezos Expeditions, and Techstars Ventures. We are looking forward to working with all of them to support Pulse Labs as it expands its services and adds new features to make Alexa skill testing easier with audiences everywhere.

Congratulations to Abhishek, Dylan and Akansha; it’s still Day 1 for Pulse Labs!