Understanding precisely how consumers and users interact with your website and apps is paramount to any company’s success. Interaction data is not only necessary, but it’s also imperative.
ContentSquare — a SaaS digital experience insights company — has announced today that it has raised a $ 42 million Series B funding round led by Canaan, the VC firm that previously invested in LendingClub, Ebates and Match.com.
Highland Europe — a prior investor in ContentSquare — also participated in the round, as did Eurazeo and H14.
ContentSquare computes billions of touch and mouse movements every day and provides insights and analytics to help brands understand, hypothesize, and update their digital properties. With its tool operating in more than 190 countries, it takes interaction data and turns it into insights and actions that help brands to increase engagement, reduce costs, and maximize conversion rates.
“The funds will be used to continue our path to becoming the worldwide leader of digital experience insights,” Jonathan Cherki, CEO at ContentSquare, told me. “We strongly believe that the best way to improve a company is to improve its people, to empower everyone with the knowledge of how their actions perform and how they contribute to the success of their company. Therefore, we developed a software that helps businesses increase conversion rates and engagement by improving the efficiency of every person in the digital team: content manager, eCommerce director, head of acquisition, UX/UI, etc.”
One of the critical areas gaining from the funds will be the company’s AI research and development.
“Artificial intelligence is at the core of our product, helping brands understand their customers’ digital journeys in a way that is quick and easy, and we will increase the development power around it,” Cherki said. “We will invest and grow our team of 70 developers and expand to more developers, data scientists, and digital experts.”
AI continues to be an essential driver in marketing technology. The pace of AI use in marketing is not slowing down and continues to permeate the entire industry.
“The future of AI in marketing tech is to empower every team member to make the right decision to provide the right experience to their visitors with the pain of digging through mountains of data,” Cherki said. “ContentSquare provides prioritized insights based on potential impact so that the team doesn’t get lost in user data and is pointed in the right direction. We use machine-learning algorithms for in-depth experience analysis, so our users get valuable insights instantly and effortlessly and can quickly understand what hinders their user from reaching their goals.”
Geographic expansion is also crucial to ContentSquare. Founded in Paris, the company has its eye on the U.S. market.
“The timing for expansion in America is now,” Cherki said. “During the last five years, the market has focused on acquisition, but the costs of acquisition are high, and traffic does not translate into conversions. Specifically, on mobile, traffic is increasing, but conversions are not. The only way to survive in this digital jungle is through optimized, seamless digital experiences. Now, we will grow the team of 30 who currently work with Walmart, Tiffany’s, HP, Goldman Sachs and more, and expand our operations exponentially here.”
So what’s next for ContentSquare, now that the funding is in place?
“We have spent the last years building the infrastructure for our 2018 growth, and now it’s time to execute our vision,” Cherki said. “First, we needed to change the dependencies that digital teams have on data analysts, so no longer does a content manager, for example, have to wait to see the results of his actions or ask the data team to translate dashboards into actions.”
ContentSquare will also ramp up its automation capabilities as part of its roadmap.
“We constantly lack time, so we developed our artificial intelligence engine to automate insights that go directly to the teams,” Cherki said. “These insights are prioritized based on impact and show people where they need to focus on and predict the outcome in KPIs.”
Finally, Cherki says that the company will provide a solution that adapts to the mindset of the customer.
“Customers make decisions based on emotions and justify them rationally,” Cherki said. “Therefore we need to better connect and adapt to that mindset, to understand what they want to achieve and what the best way to get there is. Identifying customer mindsets based on behavior analytics is fascinating and will change the digital landscape.”
The company previously raised a $ 20 million Series A fundraising closed in the fall of 2016 led by Highland Europe and supported by business angels from Seed4soft. Since then the company has expanded globally, with offices in Paris, Munich, London and New York, and has grown to over 200 employees. Today’s round takes its total funding to $ 62 million.
