FullStory, which sells analytics tools for apps and websites, secured $25 million in new equity financing, paperwork filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission this week shows. According to Crunchbase, the infusion is FullStory’s first since August 2021, bringing the company’s total raised to around $200 million.
“FullStory can confirm that Permira has invested additional growth capital at a premium to our prior valuation from last summer,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch via email. “This is a strong signal of Permira’s belief in FullStory’s … platform that enables brands to continuously improve their digital products and experiences across web and mobile. Given current market conditions, FullStory felt that now was a very opportune time to take on additional capital to grow the business globally and cement our leadership position.”
Atlanta-based FullStory was founded in 2014 by Bruce Johnson, Joel Webber and Scott Voigt, who sought to build a product that helps brands create better customer experiences across the web and mobile. Prior to launching FullStory, the co-founders — all Georgia Institute of Technology graduates — teamed in the early 2000s to start a DevOps company called Innuvo, which was acquired by Google in 2005 for an undisclosed sum.
Originally conceived as a marketing tool, FullStory pivoted to analytics, customer success and engineering after the co-founders realized that the tooling they created to figure out why their initial idea wasn’t working had commercial potential.
Today, FullStory collects and structures digital experience data and uses AI to glean insights from behaviors. The platform tracks signals like highlights, scroll depths, pinch-to-zoom frequency and copy-and-paste, showing metrics and reconstructing a user’s journey with vector-based graphics. FullStory can also search through a range of possible “friction events” to see how often they correlate with a failure to convert (i.e., complete a desired goal, like making purchases). Saved reports and automated alerts, meanwhile, track progress and spotlight anomalies like when a click leads nowhere because of a blip in a JavaScript snippet.
FullStory claims its approach provides an easy way to understand if a customer is, for example, comparison shopping or simply performing a search. In a previous interview, Voigt said a home improvement vendor used FullStory to identify a spike in the sale of garage mats during the pandemic and update its marketing materials accordingly.
The digital transformation efforts spurred by the pandemic have been a boon for FullStory, which currently has over 3,200 customers including Groupon, Automattic, Peloton, Fidelity and JetBlue. In 2021, the company — who’s gotten backing from VCs including Kleiner Perkins, GV, Stripes, Dell Technologies Capital and Salesforce Ventures — claims to have increased annual recurring revenue by over 70% year over year.
FullStory claims it analyzed more than 15 billion user sessions in 2021, including nearly 1 trillion clicks, text highlights and scrolls.
“As people manage more of their work and personal lives online, companies across industries have embraced FullStory for the insights they need to deliver premium digital products and experiences,” Voigt said in a recent press release. “FullStory’s comprehensive DXI platform provides a unique view of real user behavior and surfaces the ‘unknown unknowns’ to drive product analytics, UX research, conversion optimization and more.”
Building differentiated digital experiences is plainly challenging. Fifty-eight percent of customers believe most brands’ experiences have little to no impact on what they end up buying and nearly half can’t tell the difference between experiences, according to a Gartner poll. Part of the problem lies with the C-suite, which continues to push for digital experiences without thorough bug testing and fully understanding what would motivate their customers to try them.
Dead links, glitches and unsubmittable forms can litter companies’ apps and websites. Not only do these present barriers to work and leisure, they can lead to overwhelmed customer service teams, staff shortages and hours-long wait times. Customers rarely forgive — 64% admit to having jumped to a competitor following a poor customer experience.
The demand for more thoughtful deployments has benefited not only FullStory but its rivals in the digital customer experience analytics space, like Clootrack. Glassbox and Decibel are perhaps the most formidable, having raised tens of millions in venture capital between them.
Keen to set the pace (or at the least maintain it), FullStory expanded its leadership team in 2021, hiring Edelita Tichepco as CFO and Google veteran Jim Miller as VP of recruitment. Will Schnabel also joined the company as SVP of alliances and partnerships, bringing experience in forging partnerships and integrations from his time at Accenture and IBM Watson.
FullStory also more than doubled its headcount in 2021 to over 500 employees, with teams around the globe including San Francisco, London, Sydney and Singapore beyond Atlanta.
Comment