Sydney startup Adora has raised a US$7 million (A$9.9 million) seed round led by Blackbird Ventures for software that maps how people actually move through digital products, SmartCompany reported in February 2026.
The problem Adora is chasing is a familiar one for large software companies. Products change every week, yet understanding where users get stuck usually depends on engineers manually tagging events and analysts stitching dashboards together. Teams end up guessing, or sifting through more data than they can act on. Adora’s pitch is that this visibility should be automatic, so product teams see broken journeys before they show up as churn or support tickets.
How it works
Adora captures every screen, interaction and user path in a live product without manual event tagging, according to SmartCompany. It then builds visual maps of user journeys and layers analytics, session replays and AI-generated usability insights over the top, flagging broken flows and points of friction.
Chief executive Omar Salem told SmartCompany the platform acts “as a safety net” for teams that ship quickly. Blackbird partner Nick Crocker described it as “the first tool that gives teams complete visibility into their live product, automatically.”
The founders
Salem was most recently head of product growth at Canva, a role focused on how users behave inside a product at scale. Co-founder and chief technology officer Nathan Scully previously built and led engineering teams at Oneflare and Amazon, according to Blackbird.
The round and customers
Skip Capital, Designer Fund, Garuda Ventures and Co Ventures joined the round, along with angel investors from Canva, Notion and Linktree. The valuation was not disclosed.
Product teams at Canva, Notion, Replit, Granola and Chess.com were using Adora in private beta at the time of the raise, SmartCompany reported, with about 2,000 more companies on the waitlist. Blackbird also lists Linktree among its customers. The company said the funds would go towards product development and hiring at its Sydney headquarters.
These customers already have access to established analytics tools, which makes their early adoption a meaningful test of whether automated journey mapping offers something the existing products do not.
Jack’s take
This is the Canva effect playing out. People who learnt their craft inside one of Australia’s biggest tech companies are leaving to build tools for the problems they saw up close, and Canva is now a customer of one of them. A waitlist of 2,000 companies suggests the problem was never unique to Canva.