SalesLoft. Calendly. Greenlight. And now, Fullstory.
Atlanta has seen four homegrown tech startups become unicorns this year, with the most recent announcement that customer experience data app Fullstory reached a $1.8 billion valuation with its $103 million Series D round of funding.
Permira led the round and was joined by existing investors Kleiner Perkins, GV, Stripes, Dell Technologies Capital, Salesforce Ventures, and Glynn Capital.
Bruce Chizen, Senior Advisor at Permira and former CEO at Adobe, will join the FullStory Board, according to a press release.
“While we recognize that valuations aren’t the ultimate measure of our progress, we are excited
that this additional capital will allow us to accelerate our mission—hiring brilliant people, building inspired products, reaching more customers—and ultimately lead the massive and emerging category that is digital experience intelligence (DXI),” Founder and CEO Scott Voigt tells Hypepotamus.
Founded in 2014, Fullstory was created by ex-Google employees to fix the most frustrating parts of the web: dead links, unsubmittable forms, failed scheduling tools, and the like.
“Our valuation is a signal of the enormous market opportunity and our potential to seize it,” he adds. “Digital products and experiences are the first — and in many cases only — way that customers engage today. Digitals frustrations like dead links, broken forms or outdated navigation are more upsetting and damaging than ever; they disrupt our ability to not just to shop, but to work, pay taxes, bank, see healthcare providers, travel, and more. DXI is exploding, as companies across every industry realize that they have to get much, much better at building digital products and experiences.”
Voigt tells Hypepotamus that the team didn’t need to raise money at this moment in time, but “given the market temperature, we felt this was an opportune time to take on funding to accelerate growth.”
The Next Chapter for Fullstory
Voigt says that Fullstory’s initial customers were small to mid-sized businesses trying to improve their digital-first appearance.
But the customer base has expanded to include larger enterprises. Fullstory currently has 3,100 customers and recently added big names companies like FTD, Financial Times, Chipotle, Fidelity, Ocado Group, and SoundCloud.
On the analytics side, Voigt says “FullStory will analyze more than 15 billion user sessions in 2021. This includes analysis of nearly 1 trillion interactions like clicks, navigations, highlights, scrolls, and frustration signals.”
The new funding will also be used to expand across Europe, the Middle East, Australia, and New Zealand.
Fullstory currently has 300 employees spread across 35 states. But the team plans to double over the next 18 months, with plans to hire around 150 additional staff in Atlanta.
“The influx of new digital customers and new patterns of behavior requires brands to intimately understand the nuances of their customers’ behavior, including the blind spots, frustrations and stumbles they experience on their digital journey. These nuances lie outside the reach of traditional analytics solutions and can only be effectively addressed by a joint effort across enterprise functions (product, marketing, engineering, operations, customer service, etc.),” Voigt adds.
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