About
Built by people who watched good accounts go quiet before they churned
Founded in 2025 in Portland, Oregon. Three people building the early-warning system that CS teams wish existed inside their existing tools.
Mission
Customer frustration does not announce itself. It accumulates quietly in support tickets and email threads, weeks before a renewal conversation goes wrong. Sturdy reads it.
Most churn does not surprise customers. They already had questions that went unanswered, failures that recurred, or doubts they voiced in a support thread or a call note. The CSM just never saw it in time. Sturdy's job is to surface those signals early enough to act on them. Not a score. Not a dashboard. A flag with the specific language that warranted it.
Our Story
How Sturdy started
Steve Hazelton spent years working in customer operations and revenue leadership at B2B software companies. The team tracked NPS, monitored health scores, held quarterly business reviews, and still lost accounts that had been signaling risk for months before the conversation.
The signals were already in the data. A support ticket where a contact wrote that leadership was asking questions about platform fit. A call note where the phrase "we expected more" appeared twice in thirty minutes. A Zendesk thread that went cold after three unresolved issues in a row. None of it triggered an alert. None of it surfaced in a health score before the renewal meeting.
The problem was not a lack of data. It was that no system read it. NPS does not capture what someone wrote in a ticket. Health scores track product usage, not frustration language. Gong records calls but nobody has time to re-read transcripts for every account before renewal season.
Steve founded Sturdy in 2025 to build the system he wished had existed: one that reads the communication data already sitting in your tools, extracts the patterns that precede churn, and flags accounts early enough for CSMs to do something about it.
Sturdy is independently funded and based in Portland, Oregon.
The team
Steve Hazelton
CEO & Co-Founder
Years of experience in customer operations and revenue leadership, watching renewal conversations go sideways because early signals were buried in support data nobody had time to read. Founded Sturdy in 2025 to surface those signals automatically.
Priya Mehta
Head of Product
Background in product design for CS and revenue tooling. Focuses on translating complex signal data into workflows that are clear enough for a CSM to act on without any additional context.
Felix Brandt
Lead Engineer
Works on ML-assisted text classification and NLP applied to customer communication data. Builds and maintains the distributed ingestion pipeline that runs Sturdy's daily analysis across connected accounts.
See what your accounts are quietly saying
We are in early access with direct onboarding. If you have 50 or more B2B accounts renewing in the next six months, we want to hear from you.