Zoovu Secures $169 Million Series C Led by FTV Capital to Deliver Data-driven Product Discovery Experiences for Ecommerce

Investment will drive Zoovu's U.S. market expansion and growth initiatives to solidify its position as the leading customer experience enablement solution for B2B and B2C brands

BOSTON - JUNE 15, 2022 – Zoovu, an AI-powered discovery experience platform for B2B and B2C ecommerce, announced today that it has raised $169 million led by FTV Capital, a sector-focused growth equity investor in innovative enterprise technology and services businesses. Zoovu will use the new funding to build out its go-to-market strategy and team, particularly in the United States, and strengthen its data-driven product platform to fuel a better ecommerce experience as it continues to empower businesses to help buyers discover products and make purchase decisions.

Over the past few years, as shopping has rapidly shifted from in-store to online, many brands and retailers have continued to struggle with successfully guiding consumers along a seamless journey from discovery to purchase. Customer confusion leads to a reduction in conversion rates, lower customer satisfaction and a higher number of returns on online purchases. Since 2020, ecommerce purchasing has accounted for nearly 20 percent of worldwide retail sales, projected to grow to 24.5 percent within the next three years. In the United States, legacy brands with a significant offline presence comprise the largest segment of ecommerce as they rush to shift to online offerings. Despite the transformational growth in ecommerce and record demand for digital solutions, significant gaps around product content and customer experience still exist, presenting a substantial opportunity to leverage technology to replicate the in-store experience in a digital setting.

Businesses and consumers today are often overwhelmed by choice paralysis, further exacerbated by complex catalogs, thousands of SKUs and filters that don’t understand context. Zoovu helps to remove friction from the online buying process by simplifying the customer experience through its user-friendly, all-in-one AI-driven platform. Zoovu automatically analyzes behavioral data and provides tips for optimizing performance, offering insights into buyer behavior, customer needs, preferences, product performance and current trends. Additionally, Zoovu structures product content and enriches it with conversational language to enable powerful and personalized product discovery experiences such as visual configurators, semantic search and conversational assistants across all digital channels and partners. The intelligent platform cleans and organizes data, making it discoverable and understandable. The company boasts a client roster of leading brands such as 3M, Euronics, Microsoft and Whirlpool.

"As the global ecommerce market continues to accelerate with more activity migrating online, the stakes have never been higher for all brands to deliver better digital experiences,"

said Brad Bernstein, managing partner at FTV Capital.

"When we first met the Zoovu team several years ago, we were immediately drawn to the way the company sits at the intersection of customer experience, digital transformation and ecommerce. By offering an intuitive, guided shopping experience, Zoovu’s platform delivers tangible ROI to brands by boosting conversion rates, average order value and customer satisfaction, ultimately driving meaningful increases in revenue."

This funding continues the positive momentum for Zoovu which saw 85 percent growth in 2020 followed by 70 percent growth in 2021. Zoovu is currently generating over $25 billion in annual sales for its customers with millions of consumers interacting with its discovery experiences daily.

"As we look to further enhance our offering and grow our platform in the United States, we are excited to partner with a leading growth equity firm in the U.S.,"

said Rob Mullen, CEO at Zoovu.

"FTV’s operational resources and expansive Global Partner Network® will help bring Zoovu to even more brands, so they can deliver discovery experiences to consumers and ultimately increase conversion rates. The FTV team possesses an intimate understanding of the pain points enterprises face every day as ecommerce adoption continues to accelerate. We are confident that together we will build Zoovu into the leading customer experience enablement solution."

"Today’s buyers want to engage directly with vendors, on their own time. At 3M we see this as an opportunity to expand our channel capabilities and provide digital experiences that make it easy to select and purchase the right 3M products for our buyer’s needs,”

said Ryan Satre, senior manager of ecommerce strategy at 3M.

“Using Zoovu, we’ve exceeded buyer expectations for what B2B buying can be and continue to see extraordinary ROI that solidifies our investment in prioritizing ecommerce channels."

Bernstein, Alex Malvone, principal at FTV Capital, and Bob Ranaldi, chief revenue advisor at FTV Capital, will join Zoovu’s board of directors as part of the investment.

About Zoovu
Ecommerce is broken. Zoovu, the #1 AI-powered product discovery platform, was born to fix it. We help B2C, B2B, and retail companies unlock their product and customer data to build exceptional ecommerce experiences, capture better insights, and drive breakthrough results. The world’s largest ecommerce businesses, like Microsoft, 3M, LEGO, and Einhell, use Zoovu to sell more and increase customer satisfaction while cutting operational costs and leveraging insights into customer behavior to grow faster. Headquartered in Boston, Zoovu is a global company with over 250 employees and offices in EMEA and North America. Learn more at https://zoovu.com.

About FTV Capital
FTV Capital is a sector-focused growth equity investment firm that has raised $6.2 billion to invest in high-growth companies offering a range of innovative solutions in three sectors: enterprise technology and services, financial services, and payments and transaction processing. FTV’s experienced team leverages its domain expertise and proven track record in each of these sectors to help motivated management teams accelerate growth. FTV also provides companies with access to its Global Partner Network®, a group of the world’s leading enterprises and executives who have helped FTV portfolio companies for two decades. Founded in 1998, FTV Capital has invested in over 130 portfolio companies, including Agiloft, Docupace, EBANX, Lean Solutions Group, LoanPro, LogicSource, Luma Health, ReliaQuest and Vagaro, and successfully exited/partially exited companies including Enfusion (NYSE: ENFN), Globant (NYSE: GLOB), InvestCloud (recapitalized), MedSynergies (acquired by Optum), RapidRatings (recapitalized), Strata Fund Solutions (acquired by Alter Domus), VPay (acquired by Optum) and WorldFirst (acquired by Ant Financial). FTV has offices in San Francisco, New York and Connecticut. For more information, please visit www.ftvcapital.com and follow the firm on LinkedIn.

Media Contacts

Zoovu
Sarah Assous
[email protected]
617-794-5571

Prosek Partners on behalf of FTV Capital
Alexa Ottenstein
[email protected]
646-818-9051