User-generated content marketing platform Yotpo closes $51M Series D round

Yotpo, a platform that lets companies gather content from their customers in the form of reviews, Q&As, photos and videos, mainly for use in marketing, has closed $51 million in Series D funding.

The round is led by Access Industries (ClalTech), with participation from existing backers Bessemer Venture Partners, Marker, Vintage Partners, Blumberg Capital, Rhodium, and 2B Angels, in addition to new investor Vertex Ventures. It brings total funding for the Tel Aviv-headquartered company to $101 million.

Founded in 2011, Yotpo’s user-generated content marketing platform makes it easy for businesses to solicit reviews and other user-generated content, and then to amplify this content for marketing purposes or simply to use for customer feedback.

It says it uses AI and a data-driven approach that ensures content is requested at the most optimum time and in the most appropriate way, post-purchase. By doing this, the startup claims to have the highest order-to-review conversion rates in the industry.

Specifically, co-founder and CEO Tomer Tagrin tells me Yotpo is using billions of behavioural data points to learn consumer behaviour patterns “to create smarter requests that are sent in the right way, at the right time, every time”. This includes emails that are personalised based on time so customers receive requests at the moment when they’re most likely to respond.

In addition, Yotpo’s algorithms identify the device and email client used to open the email and adapt the format dynamically to create the most frictionless submission experience.

Furthermore, the startup is using sentiment analysis to analyse the user-generated content that is submitted. “Yotpo uses natural language processing to ensure that reviews are classified accurately by both star ratings and textual analysis,” says Tagrin.

“That means smarter marketing, fewer missed opportunities, and much better on-site optimisation. This level of understanding impacts reviews automatically shared on-site and on social media”.

Meanwhile, Yotpo says it will use the funding to build out its “enterprise-grade platform” and continue global expansion. This will include the opening of a second U.S. office in Salt Lake (it already has office in Tel Aviv, New York, and London), and the addition of 150 employees, bringing total headcount to over 400.

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/08/yotpo-series-d/