Bratislava-based CloudTalk, which makes AI-powered software for call centres, has raised a €26m Series B (€20m in equity and €6m in debt) co-led by Dutch CVC KPN Ventures and Budapest-based Lead Ventures.
Budapest, 3. June 2021. Budapest-based Recart has so far generated over USD 200 million additional revenues for its clients. The mobile marketing platform helps thousands of webshops by, among others, convincing interested buyers to complete their abandoned purchases through analyzed real-time behavioral data. The investment is made by Enter Tomorrow venture capital fund which is managed by Lead Ventures. Recart will use the investment to further develop its automated online marketing software and to boost sales.
Tesla, Nestlé, Pepsi, Red Bull – four heavyweights who use Shopify, the second largest e-commerce platform after eBay in the U.S. Over 1 million online shops operate on this platform, including the official webshops of Cristian Ronaldo and Robbie Williams, also the clients of Recart.
The company, which operates a New York office as well, will now obtain a USD 3.5 million investment. USD 2.5 million comes from Enter Tomorrow venture capital fund, which is managed by Lead Ventures, and USD 250,000-250,000 from Oktogon Ventures and Day One Capital, respectively. The rest will be provided by private investors in order to ensure it can handle one of the most urgent problems of online shops, customer relations, with greater efficiency.
Recart built the first version of its product in 2016 to resolve a serious problem, namely that over three-quarter of purchases are never completed by customers: the process is halted, and the chosen items remain in the basket. “Most often it does not happen because people lose interest in the product or shopping, but usually some kind of outside factor” – shared the basic insight of the undertaking launched in 2016 Soma Tóth Founder-Managing Director. Recart was the first in the world to make automated messages available on Facebook Messenger at the end of 2017, to lower the number of abandoned shopping baskets.
Today, Recart assists online stores that are mostly Shopify clients in full marketing automatization, so they can stay in touch with their customers in a more effective way. Based on their proper analysis of real-time behavioral data, interested buyers can be addressed with good hit accuracy in a way that webshops can manage to hold onto them or by, for instance, offering them a personal discount, to earn revenues they otherwise might have lost. For this, Recart has developed an online marketing platform which automates e-store communication and marketing activities with customers on various message sending platforms, such as Facebook Messenger. Recart has also managed to initiate two-way discussions with customers by SMS, who can receive personalized offers and can ask questions. “This not only makes it easier to complete a purchase, but also makes data collection more effective and improves customer loyalty” – says Soma Tóth.
The viability of the technology is well illustrated by the fact that while the reach of promotional e-mails shows a continuously declining tendency, Messenger messages can boast 85-90 percent opening rates and 20 percent click rates. SMS messages have even better figures, where the rates are 98, and 40 percent, respectively. Since WhatsApp has even more users than Messenger, the solution will become available in this application as well from the third quarter. According to plans, - likely from the beginning of 2022 - they will move onto Apple Business Chat and RCS, which is richer than the SMS environment, provided the marketing messages will become available there.
In addition to expanding their American presence, they will also use the investment amount provided by Enter Tomorrow venture capital fund - created with the participation of MOL and MFB Invest, in which Oktogon Ventures, Day One Capital and two angel investors also showed interest in 2019 - to double the development team within a few months. „The pandemic has sped up the penetration of digital purchases in commerce by about five years” – Balázs Haszonics, CFO of Lead Ventures, explained the involvement of Enter Tomorrow, which is managed by them. According to Mr. Haszonics, without the presence of the virus, e-commerce in the U.S. would have reached the USD 840 billion value threshold next year, which has been crossed last year already, due to the well-known circumstances.
Balázs Haszonics is confident that similarly to the major changes in e-commerce, tectonic changes can also be expected in the market of message services. According to expert estimates, 70 percent of the world’s population will have access to mobile technology by 2023. Unsurprisingly, according to the prognosis of Marketwatch, which publishes up-to-date and authentic financial information business news, analyses and stock market figures, the chatmarketing market can become a USD 2 billion business by 2025. Recart, which offers a more comprehensive and more effective solution than its competitors, can become a vital player in this market. Recart is currently the number one message sending option in Shopify App Store: so far, over 155,000 merchants have used this solution.
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Lead Ventures
Lead Ventures is a venture capital firm of Central and Eastern Europe, a specialist of growth investments. Its mission is to support the most promising scale-ups of the region with capital, expertise and wide-ranging professional network, so they can transfrom their industries with their innovation. Lead Ventures typically invests in excess of EUR 2 million by aiming at companies who have received seed funding and are now in the capital-intensive growth phase. Lead Ventures has EUR 100 million under management. MOL and Eximbank are the investors of the investment fund Enter Tomorrow Europe. The venture capital firm has already invested in the Czech Neuro Soundware, which provides sound-based diagnostics for industrial equipment, as well as the Slovak GA Drilling, developing plasma-based drilling technology, the Croatian insurance technology provider, Amodo, as well as BitNinja, providing server protection solutions developed by its Hungarian team, and the Berlin-based mobility service provider, Surve.
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