dscout Makes Strategic Moves to Solidify its Leadership Position in Human Experience Research

Acquires Panelfox, Establishes International Footprint, Expands Executive Management Team

CHICAGO, March 16, 2023 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- dscout, the end-to-end human experience research platform, today announced a number of strategic moves and investments that solidify the company's position and demonstrate its leadership in the experience research category.

"Building upon the $70 Million we secured in Series C investment in 2022, dscout is putting the key pieces in place that it needs to drive accelerated growth for its end-to-end experience research solution, with both current customers and new market segments" said Michael Winnick, Founder and CEO, dscout. "dscout is becoming the way to conduct experience research, and we are ready to scale quickly in order to deliver on the enormous opportunity ahead of us."

To provide a seamless experience for organizations running research with their own participants, dscout has acquired Panelfox, an all-in-one software platform that helps researchers build panels and manage recruitment for research. The Panelfox acquisition will serve as dscout's entry point into the mid-market space, where it will provide a user research management platform at an entry-level price point optimized for smaller teams and less mature research organizations.

"dscout's participant recruiting experience is already world class," said Michael Winnick. "With the addition of Panelfox, we are ensuring the same high level of quality when our customers opt to work with their own participants."

"We're thrilled to officially join the amazing team at dscout," said Michael Mukhin, Founder, Panelfox. "In many ways, Panelfox is a natural extension of dscout's existing user research management platform. Both teams care deeply about people, and share the same vision of human-centered design through best practices in research tools. dscout places a high value on user experience and beautiful design, and has the potential to radically change the way businesses conduct human experience research. We are proud to contribute to this effort."

To meet international demand for human experience research outside North America, dscout has expanded its geographic footprint by establishing a presence in the United Kingdom, led by Managing Director International Ben Hogg (formerly of Lucid LLC, Research Now and Nielsen, and a Fellow of the Market Research Society).

"In the past few years, we've seen an explosion in demand for digital user insights and ethnography, with researchers needing to gain immediate and actionable insights from consumers around the world," said Ben Hogg. "My focus is on growing our international participant pool and our customer base, to ensure that every voice and every opinion can be heard in moments that matter."

On the heels of $70 million in Series C investment secured from Guidepost Growth Equity in March 2022, dscout has accelerated its hiring initiatives, increasing headcount by 70% in the last 12 months, and is on target to continue its pace of momentum in FY 2023. To help spearhead dscout's next phase of growth, the company recently added two proven industry leaders to its senior management team:

• Brad Talkington, a highly experienced finance professional with more than a decade of experience leading high-growth SaaS-based technology businesses, has joined dscout as Chief Financial Officer. Most recently, Talkington worked as a senior finance executive for Enverus, where he oversaw the company's rapid growth through both organic and inorganic operations, as well as rapid domestic and international growth, and led financial diligence and integration of over 20 acquisitions ranging in size from less than $5M in revenue to over $100M in revenue. Talkington started his career over one decade ago at KPMG in Houston.
• Julie Norvaisas has joined dscout as Vice President of Research, where she will expand internal research capabilities and advise customers on broader challenges for research leaders. Most recently, Norvaisas served as the Head of User Experience Research and Content Design at LinkedIn, where, over the course of 8 ½ years she built a diverse, high-performing team that scaled in influence under her leadership, growing from 2 to 50 employees, and helping the organization drive human-centered insights through strategy and product development across all of LinkedIn's consumer and enterprise products. Norvaisas is also a former Board Member of the University of Wisconsin's AC Nielsen Center for Marketing Research.

"dscout is already the preferred platform of choice for human experience research, and has massive potential to drive the industry forward," said Chip Hardt, Chief Operating Officer, dscout. "At this pivotal moment for the industry, we are applying our collective experience to ensure that the company can scale rapidly to take advantage of the enormous opportunity ahead, while continually increasing the value we offer to our customers."

About dscout
dscout's experience research platform helps businesses capture high-quality human insights with the industry's most flexible and powerful research tools. The dscout platform supports the entire research lifecycle, from general exploration to informed discovery to evaluative testing. Dscout empowers researchers to recruit, field, manage, analyze, and share quality insights with a greater degree of flexibility, control, speed, and impact. dscout's Recruit feature enables researchers to find great participants, quickly and easily. Express blends quantitative and qualitative research to provide meaningful answers in less time. Live offers a way to host more powerful 1:1 sessions from anywhere, anytime. Diary captures in-the-moment insights over time. For more information, please visit https://dscout.com/.

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Media Contact

Maura Ginty, dscout, 1 (312) 880-9715, [email protected]

Rebecca West, Helium Communications, (415) 260-6094, [email protected]

SOURCE dscout