Helsinki-based e-commerce analytics and marketing automation-software provider Nosto Solutions just closed a $5.5 million Series A led by Wellington Partners and with participation from existing investors Open Ocean Capital and SanomaVentures, along with Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation.
As with most series A of this size, the funding will allow Nosto to keep up with it progressive international expansion, which has already plugged the company with over 1200 online retailers in over 30 countries, including bigger customers such as Bauhaus, Philips and LUSH. According to Nosto, the company’s revenues have grown over 500% since its launch less than year ago in October 2013.
A retailer considering whether to jump the Nosto train will find it much less of a financial commitment to make than they might’ve initially thought: Nosto is completely free to implement. That is, the only payment is a percentual cut that is based on the revenue the automation tool is bringing in! Nosto keeps track of any purchases completed through the features it generates so that the origins of revenues don’t get mixed up and the shares are clear.
The tool itself gets busy making customer experiences more unique by offering personalized recommendations based on customer behaviour analysis. That means more relevant search results, automated cross selling (showing products other customers have purchased) and simple yet, from a customer’s point of view, noteworthy stuff like shopping history retention. Additionally, the service sends cheesy (but apparently effective) invitation emails to customers who’ve abandoned their carts or who simply haven’t visited the online store in a while.
Nosto prides itself as being easy to implement on nearly any e-commerce platform and guarantees the integration should take no longer that a few moments of programming.
Juha Valvanne (on the left of the picture), CEO and Founder of Nosto, is pleased to welcome Wellington Partners on board and seems to be quite pleased with the developments that took place in the recent year: “Our mission is to make online shopping more enjoyable by delivering customers personalized shopping experiences. After successfully releasing our self service solution last autumn, and seeing the huge interest, we continue fulfilling our mission by building new tools to help people connect with the products they want across their entire shopping journey.” he says. “To attract the backing of an organization like Wellington Partners is a strong validation of our business and our technology. This funding enables us to continue investing substantially in innovation, technology and people.”
Since its seed funding round in April 2013, launching its self service solution, and following the hire of Matti Rönkkö, former Global Venture Development Director at Rocket Internet to lead the global expansion, Nosto has tripled the size of its team with new recruits from Google, Amazon and other global e-commerce players.
