Web analytics company ClickTale, the innovator of what it calls "In-Page Analytics", today announced that European technology investor Amadeus Capital Partners has led a $17m Series B growth stage investment in the company. Other investors include Goldrock Capital and Viola Credit, which granted the company a $3 million credit line. The investment proceeds will fund product development and accelerate global growth, the company said.
The current round sheds light on the meteoric success of ClickTale. The company was founded in 2006, and became profitable within two years. Its current annual sales revenue is in the tens of millions of dollars. It profitability helped the company to maintain itself almost unaided up to now, apart from a small round of $800,000 in 2007, mostly raised from Yoav Leitersdorf's YL Ventures.
Amadeus Capital Partners, which led the current round, is behind investments in other Israeli companies, among them GreenRoad, Celltick, and ComQi. It has also invested in a rival to ClickTale, Tobii Technology.
ClickTale was founded by its CEO Dr. Tal Schwartz and CTO Arik Yavilevich . While traditional web analytics track only page-to-page navigation, ClickTale records and analyzes the True-to-Life User Experience inside the page, helping businesses achieve their online goals such as converting more site visitors into buyers or increasing engagement with site content. ClickTale’s premier product, ClickTale Core, provides anonymous playback of user browsing sessions, aggregated heatmaps of in-page activity, as well as tools to increase form completion and optimize conversions.
"Most companies recognize the importance of the user experience, but few have visibility into their users’ website activities. A recent Baymard Institute review revealed that a full 67% of shopping carts are abandoned prior to checkout. Since ClickTale provides full visibility by capturing the entire browsing session including every mouse move, click, hover and scroll, online marketing and ecommerce managers can finally discover and understand why customers abandon shopping carts, what errors they experience, and where poor user experience frustrates them," the company says.
“We are excited to have Amadeus and Goldrock join ClickTale as we continue to create more value for our customers by helping them achieve online success,” said Dr. Schwartz, “The support of our founding investor, YL Ventures, has been a major factor in our success to date. This investment will enable us to broaden our product offerings, invest in R&D and expand our operations globally.”
ClickTale has more than 80,000 clients, including some of the world’s largest websites such as T-Mobile, CBS, and Lenovo. It employs some 120 people at its offices in the Diamond Exchange in Ramat Gan. Unusually for an Israeli start up, its sales team has remained in Israel and has not been transferred to the US.
"I returned from the US after 20 years there, and I have a great deal of Zionism in me and the belief that it can be done in Israel," Dr. Schwartz explains. "There are good people here, who can speak several languages, and if it can be done in Israel, so much the better. The fact that we worked from Israel enabled us to become profitable pretty quickly."
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on April 30, 2013
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