ContentSquare, which offers cloud-based software that helps businesses understand how and why users are interacting with their app, mobile and web sites, has picked up $42 million in Series B funding.
The round is led Canaan, the U.S. VC firm that has previously invested in LendingClub, Ebates, and Match.com, with participation from previous backer Highland Europe, Eurazeo, and H14. The new injection of capital for the Paris startup will be used to grow the business in the U.S. and globally.
In a call with co-founder and CEO Jonathan Cherki, he explained that ContentSquare ‘digital experience’ (UX) platform has been developed to go beyond traditional web or mobile app analytics to not only enable companies to see how users interact with their digital experiences but to make the resulting insights actionable. This can include making changes to specific page or content elements (or combinations) to increase engagement and conversion rates.
To do this, the software, which is used by content, eCommerce, analytics, acquisition, IT and UX teams, claims to compute billions of touch and mouse movements every day in 191 countries. The longer term vision, explained Cherki, is to become the first “fully automated, Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven” digital experience platform.
It’s no longer enough to know where users or customers are dropping off or stalling, but what should done to rectify this. The thinking behind ContentSquare is that if these actionable insights can be delivered automatically and in an easy to understand way, analytics can be a driver for change in the way digital teams work across the whole company. “This is about people transformation more than digital transformation,” says the ContentSquare CEO.
To make this vision more of a reality, the company has recently rolled out new features and technology, including what it describes as an AI engine to analyse behavioural data and offer automatic insights, and its “Auto-Zone” feature that replaces content tagging and tag configuration with automatic element identification. The latter means that ContentSquare automatically recognises different page or app elements and can therefore track changes more easily to feed into the aforementioned AI engine.
Meanwhile, the company previously raised a $20 million Series A fundraising in late 2016 led by Highland Europe and supported by business angels from Seed4soft. Since then ContentSquare has expanded globally and now has offices in Paris, Munich, London and New York, and has grown to over 200 employees. It says it has 120 customers worldwide, including Orange, Rakuten, Carrefour, Walmart, Tiffany’s, Clarks, Goldman Sachs, Abbott, SNCF, AccorHotels, and L’Occitane.
