Former Canva Exec’s Product Mapping Startup, Adora, Designs $9.9 Million Seed Round
•February 10, 2026
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Companies Mentioned
Why It Matters
By delivering real‑time, end‑to‑end visibility into user experiences, Adora helps product teams reduce friction and prioritize features as AI accelerates release cycles, a capability increasingly critical for scaling digital products.
Key Takeaways
- •$7M seed round led by Blackbird Ventures.
- •AI maps user journeys automatically, no manual tagging.
- •Early adopters include Canva, Notion, Chess.com.
- •2,000 companies on waitlist signal strong demand.
- •Funds target product build-out and Sydney hiring.
Pulse Analysis
Product teams today grapple with an explosion of feature variations driven by AI‑assisted development, making traditional analytics and static screenshots insufficient. Adora’s platform tackles this gap by continuously recording every user interaction and automatically generating visual journey maps. The AI layer surfaces usability issues and opportunities in real time, allowing teams to move beyond fragmented data silos toward a holistic view of the customer experience.
The seed round, anchored by Blackbird Ventures and supported by Designer Fund and other investors, underscores confidence in the market need for automated journey mapping. Early adopters such as Canva, Notion, Replit and Chess.com have already reported tangible gains in friction reduction and insight speed. A wait‑list of roughly 2,000 companies further validates demand, positioning Adora as a potential standard tool for product growth squads seeking to scale without sacrificing user‑centric design.
For the broader SaaS ecosystem, Adora’s approach could reshape how product roadmaps are prioritized. By surfacing actionable insights directly from live user flows, teams can pre‑emptively address pain points before they amplify, shortening feedback loops and improving time‑to‑value. As AI continues to lower the barrier for rapid feature deployment, tools that provide comprehensive, automated visibility will become indispensable, making Adora’s solution a strategic asset for any organization aiming to maintain competitive product experiences.
Former Canva exec’s product mapping startup, Adora, designs $9.9 million Seed round
AI‑powered journey mapping and product insights platform cofounded by Canva’s former head of product has raised US$7 million (A$9.9 m) in Seed funding
The round for Adora was led by Blackbird Ventures, supported by Designer Fund, Skip Capital, Co Ventures and Garuda Ventures.
Adora, founded by Omar Salem and Nathan Scully, has already launched with product teams from the likes of Canva, Notion, Replit, Granola and Chess.com using it in private beta, with another 2,000 companies on Adora’s wait‑list to have a crack.
Adora captures every screen, interaction, and user path across a product automatically, so you don’t have to worry about manual event tagging. The platform then creates live visual maps of user journeys, overlaid with analytics and AI‑powered usability insights, so teams can see what customers experience.
Salem, Adora’s CEO, said product teams can struggle to understand what their work actually looks like in a user’s hands.
“I felt this pain firsthand at Canva, where I led the Product Growth team. The product was in the hands of hundreds of millions of people, from teachers and students to Fortune 500 companies, all with different features and product experiences available to them,” he explained.
“Yet we had no reliable way to understand what experience we were serving each group. We ended up relying on test accounts and screenshots that went stale almost immediately.
As teams scale across languages, devices, and user types, they’re forced to rely on static screenshots, outdated Figma files, and fragmented analytics that fail to capture the full user experience. Teams scramble for demo logins, design docs, or experiment write‑ups just to piece together a single user journey.”
The funds will go towards product build‑out and adding to the headcount at Adora’s Sydney HQ.
Tracking the user experience
Adora founders Nathan Scully, CTO & Omar Salem, CEO
Saleh said the pace of product development is accelerating even further with AI‑assisted coding, which results in a near‑impossible number of variations to keep track of.
“Teams that once had to make tough prioritisation trade‑offs are now shipping more features, faster than ever before. But without a way to visualise and monitor the real user journey, that speed quickly leads to fragmented, inconsistent experiences,” he said.
“Adora helps teams stay ahead by acting as a safety net, using AI to surface issues and opportunities early, before they snowball into bigger problems.”
Chess.com chief growth officer Albert Cheng can already see how Adora is transforming product building.
“Each year, tens of millions of people sign up to learn and play chess across multiple languages and user journeys,” he said.
“Adora has given us real‑time visibility into these flows, uncovering meaningful opportunities to reduce friction for our users.”
Blackbird partner Nick Crocker said there’s a lot of noise about AI changing how software gets built.
“But the best product teams still need to understand what users actually experience and that’s harder than ever as products scale,” he said.
“Omar and Nathan built Adora because they lived this at Canva and Amazon. It’s the first tool that gives teams complete visibility into their live product, automatically. The customer obsession is already there – the feedback from early users has been extraordinary.”
More at Adora.so
Adora’s journey mapping. Supplied
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