Big-data ecommerce analytics startup Qubit, which provides online retailers and their marketers with tools to optimize sales by conducting A/B testing and personalizing the content each user sees, has announced a $26 million Series B round of funding, led by Accel Parters.
Salesforce Ventures also participated in the round, along with existing investor Balderton Capital. The startup raised a Series A round of $7.5 million in 2012, and has raised $36.5 million in total since being founded back in 2010 by a group of ex-Googlers.
Qubit said it plans to use the new funding for continued R&D investment, including predictive data, and for pushing aggressively in the U.S.
“We have some very exciting developments in predictive data and empowering marketers to take control of their optimization strategies,” said co-founder and CEO Graham Cooke. “We’re also continuing to scale up our sales, professional services and marketing teams in the U.S. and Europe.”
Qubit now has more than 150 enterprise customers in the U.K. and the U.S., according to Cooke, including Hilton Hotels, Jimmy Choo, Staples, Farfetch, Topshop and Uniqlo. It reports 260% year on year growth in sales in the six months to June 2014.
The company’s flagship product — Visitor Cloud — works by creating detailed profiles for each visitor to an ecommerce property so that the business can then apply “data-driven” personalizations to optimize sales, based on analyzing their interactions to identify patterns of buying behavior.
“Most optimization technologies are just point solutions that aren’t looking at the entire customer journey which is largely why optimisation strategies have failed in the past,” said Cooke, discussing how Qubit’s offering differs from rivals in this space.
“Adobe’s Marketing Cloud is the only other company that’s consolidating digital optimization but they’ve had a hard time bringing it all together with a host of acquisitions over the last 10 years. At Qubit we have built it from the ground up harnessing the advances in the Hadoop ecosystem and Javascript.”
As part of the investment Bruce Golden, an early investor in the likes of Qliktech, Comscore and Responsys, has joined Qubit’s board.
Commenting on the funding round in a statement, Balderton’s Bernard Liautaud, who also sits on Qubit’s board, said: “We are happy that Accel and Salesforce now join us in supporting Qubit’s rapid growth. Since we invested in Qubit in 2012 they have built a world-class integrated data platform, grown to be the leader in their sector in the UK and made a successful entry into the US market.”