Watchful Reveals $3 Million to Give Companies Intelligence on Their Competitors’ App Roadmaps

Watchful Tells Companies What New Features Their Competitors Are Going to Launch

Watchful left stealth, announcing $3 million in seed funding for the world’s first product strategy intelligence solution. The seed round was led by Vertex Ventures Israel and included prominent Israeli angel investors. Watchful’s platform is already being used by some of the world’s biggest consumer mobile apps to give them an information edge.

“Existing competitive intelligence solutions mostly track external metrics like website traffic, downloads or active users,” said Yanai Oron, General Partner at Vertex Ventures Israel. “Watchful’s approach is unique, delivering in-app insights that enable companies to really understand what their competitors are building, testing and planning.”

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Mobile apps are critical to entire industries, such as social media, ecommerce, food delivery and streaming. Companies are constantly innovating to deliver the best user experience, simplest flow and most useful set of features. Development is a race as new features, UX design changes and even pricing models are built, A/B tested and eventually rolled out in the hope of winning more users.

Product and strategy teams struggle to keep up with what’s in their own app; tracking what competitors are doing has become unfeasible. In some companies, product managers spend hours each day just downloading and using competitor apps, or simply relying on guesswork and instinct rather than real data.

Watchful is the first product strategy intelligence solution, giving leading companies detailed internal information about their competitors’ applications to enable them to make informed product decisions. Using a combination of techniques borrowed from cybersecurity, including differential analysis and AI-powered recognition tools, Watchful uncovers hidden features buried inside the app’s code, A/B tests, upcoming changes to the app’s design, internal user flows and even performance information like startup times and battery usage. The platform also provides this same information about a company’s own app, giving large enterprises visibility into what other teams are developing and allowing benchmarking with competitors.

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Watchful was founded by Itay Kahana, who had faced these challenges himself at his previous startup, Any.do. At the popular to-do list app, Kahana had to devote expensive R&D resources to developing new features, but without a full picture of what else was happening in the market.

“I didn’t know what my competitors were doing, and if it was working for them or not,” said Itay Kahana. “We were forced to make business decisions in the dark. I realized there had to be a better way, and that’s how Watchful was born. Competitive intelligence is stuck in the 1990s; we’re enabling companies to know about major changes their competitors are planning, months ahead of when these innovations would become public”.

Watchful already has a team of 25 people and several Fortune 100 clients including household names. In January, Watchful’s discovery that the social video app TikTok was about to launch a sophisticated deepfake generator received wide coverage, ultimately forcing Tiktok to remove the code from their English language app. The company is using its newly-announced funding to improve the AI-powered automated discovery tools, as well as expanding its coverage into more additional app verticals and markets.

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