Highlight: The Future of Product Testing Gets $18M Funding Boost

The Highlight is an in-home product testing company. It has secured $18 million in Series A funding. Back in 2020, Highlight was cofounded by Dana Kim and Ethan Kellough. The company optimizes product testing for brands, replacing the traditional lengthy and costly processes. Dana Kim said;

“The number of SKUs on the grocery store shelves is exploding. Thirty thousand products launch every year, and 95% of them fail. With 75 million SKUs on Walmart shelves today, there’s just a ton of risk and reward, but the point of product testing is really to de-risk and enable product success.”

As innovation speeds up, so does the CPG firm’s innovation timeframe. This has revealed the need for immediate dashboards, flexible insights, and quick data collection in testing. Highlight aims to make this process automatic by integrating all these aspects into a single platform. Customers can quickly arrange tests and obtain product results. The company is rapidly growing. It is evident from the rapidly increasing no of staff and customers and of course the revenue. Major brands like Nestlé, Estée Lauder, and Target are their clients. A recent addition is a client portal, optimizing product testing to a nine-minute task completed through a few clicks.

Brands target their particular audience via a community of 25,000+ “Highlighters.” Customers send their products to Highlight, which manages the whole process and shares the community review as it arrives. Acre Venture Partners and HearstLab led an $18 million Series A funding round. Ingeborg Investments and GS Futures also joined this funding round. Angel investors participated, including former Favor CEO Jag Bath and Ryan Nece of Next Legacy Ventures. Highlight’s total raise is approximately $30 million after this funding round.

Kim is planning to accelerate Highlight’s product roadmap with this funding. Kim also wants to introduce a more user-friendly experience with templates and best practice resources. Moreover, they also aim to onboard the “Highlighters” waitlist and improve user experience while expanding their team. Kim said;

“We have really cemented this awesome position in the market as the first and only product testing platform that allows you to get quality data on the agile timelines that you desire. We’re moving from a product testing platform to a product intelligence platform. That’s why when we think about features, it’s building on that unfair data advantage and making that big jump.”