Contentsquare, a startup that helps brands understand how customers interact with their websites, announced Tuesday it closed on a $190 million Series D round led by BlackRock’s Private Equity Partners team. Sapiance Capital Limited is also providing credit to the company.
Using artificial intelligence, Contentsquare’s platform gathers billions of anonymous web, mobile and app interactions and converts them into actionable insights and recommendations to help these businesses increase revenue, engagement and growth. The company collects data on everything from content to user experience and pricing to help businesses better understand what their customers are doing and why.
These insights could be especially useful amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which has led to a considerable surge in online shopping around the world. With this in mind, Contentsquare also recently launched a COVID-19 eCommerce Impact Data Hub to provide week-by-week analytics on the ways this crisis has affected consumer behavior based on metrics like traffic, page views, time-per-session, transactions and conversion rate. Among other things, the tool has found that sales on supermarket, retail and sport equipment sites has increased considerably, while activity on sites related to tourism and retail healthcare has gone down.
“We’ve seen a 30 percent increase in traffic and a 44 percent increase in transactions across our clients, with the situation varying dramatically by industry,” Contentsquare’s CMO Aimee Stone Munsell told Built In. “Telco, consumer electronics and entertainment have seen some of the biggest increases and we in turn are seeing more demand from these sectors overall. We’ve also seen serious buyers from companies in personal financial services like taxes and insurance and omni-channel retailers who are under intense pressure to dramatically transform their digital channels.”
Founded in 2012 in France, Contentsquare moved its headquarters to NYC in 2017 and has since accumulated about 700 customers, including 30 percent of the Global Fortune 100 companies like American Express, Best Buy, T-Mobile and Toyota, according to the company. To date, Contentsquare has raised $312 million, growing its annual recurring revenue by nearly 200 percent just last year.
Munsell says Contentsquare more than doubled its headcount last year and, in light of this new funding, will hire another 200 employees within the year, hiring for product, marketing, sales and customer success roles in its eight offices around the world. The money will also be used to innovate the platform and expand the business across the Americas, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
“This investment during these uncertain times is proof of the fantastic job our teams have done,” founder and CEO Jonathan Cherki said in a statement. “It validates the strength of our vision for the next five years and extends our global leadership in experience analytics at a time when these capabilities are critical to all businesses.”
