Tugce Bulut stepped into the tech industry with a vision to unveil consumer behavior in untapped markets around the world. During her time as a traveling strategy consultant, she saw resource-poor areas and realized the shortage of accessible information for consumer companies in these markets. That’s when she founded Streetbees.

Tugce says companies didn’t have enough information to assess the risk of entering those markets. “We created Streetbees as a platform to be able to provide visibility to any part of the world, to any segments of the society on equal footing,” Tugce said. Her goal was to “democratize the data and to be able to provide that information to the world's largest companies so that with confidence, they can go to either rural India or tier 4 cities in China.”

That was seven years ago, and now Streetbees has 4.5 million users across 189 countries.  And in the last year, they raised $40M in a Series B financing round. 

In this episode of Forge Ahead, Tugce talks about the democratization of data, achieving zero customer churn, increasing user engagement through UX, and growing quickly by leveraging pre-existing resources.