UK Analytics Startup Formisimo Raises £350K To Make Online Forms Suck Less

Formisimo, the UK-based online form analytics startup, has raised a £350,000 seed round. Backers include the North West Fund, two unnamed London angel investors, and pan-European accelerator Seedcamp (from which Formisimo just graduated).

The new capital will be used to enable the company to relocate to the UK city Manchester, after its acceleration stint in London, and to grow the team to a headcount of around 14 in the next 12 months. The young startup has also appointed Anish Kapoor, the co-founder of Telecity, as its first Manchester-based adviser.

Formisimo is tackling the problem of web forms/online checkouts that go unfilled because of factors, such as confusingly worded questions, layout or formatting errors, and rogue auto-filling wreaking havoc with the user’s intentions. It offers cloud-based web analytics specifically targeted at improving the performance of forms so e-commerce companies can identify where their users are going wrong.

In our profile of the startup back in January, Formisimo’s founder Al Mackin described web forms as “the forgotten part of almost every conversion funnel,” and argued they further suffer because the responsibility for forms often falls between the marketing department and the web development team — with neither taking ownership.

“They’re in a no-man’s land but they form a huge barrier between a website and the web visitor who is eager to engage in that business,” he told TechCrunch. “One of the igniters behind this idea was a company I knew that spent millions of pounds on their digital marketing and thousands of man hours on optimising their pages and advertising but they completely overlooked their web forms.”

The problem is pretty big, too, with some estimates suggesting 67 percent of people who start filling out an online checkout form don’t actually complete the buying process. That’s a lot of money left on the table.

To that end, the startup says, since launching in beta in May 2013, it’s tracked more than 380 million customer interactions and counts over 1,000 companies as users. Brands that have already signed up to Formisimo include Travelex, Secret Escapes, Genting, WeBuyAnyCar, Asda, Thomas Cook, Borro and The FT. Not bad going for a company that has been bootstrapped till now.

Interestingly, the company appears to have moved away from its freemium model and now offers mostly paid tiers only (Update: there is still a fairly hidden free tier). However, it does offer a 14-day free trial.

In a rather bullish statement, Seedcamp’s Reshma Sohoni, says: “Every E-commerce and B2B business marketing head should be using Formisimo. If they aren’t, the CEO should be calling them in right now. That’s why we backed Formisimo.”

For the sake of marketing heads everywhere, who have yet to get their online form analytics in order, let’s hope no CEOs are reading. Oh wait…