Stonly, a customer onboarding platform, raises $22M series A led by Northzone and Accel

In the age of COVID — or rather, the age of massive digitization of services, post-COVID — online customers want to onboard themselves to products and platforms. After all, isn’t it faster? And isn’t it cheaper for the platforms themselves? Playing in this space are companies like ScreenSteps, Scribe, Poka, Dozuki and others.

The France-based Stonly has also been on this since 2018. It’s now raised a Series A investment of $22 million led by European VC Northzone, with participation from existing investor Accel. A few angels are also participating, including Miro CEO Andrey Khusid, YC group partner Nicolas Dessaigne, Personio CPO Roman Schumacher and Dashlane ex-CEO Emmanuel Schalit.

Stonly founder Alexis Fogel created the business after noting that customers wanted self-service onboarding and troubleshooting, and that this could be scaled easily across companies, as a platform play.

He said: “Stonly breaks down the barriers between product guidance and customer support, providing companies with the ability to adapt content to different use cases and distribute it contextually, resolving customer issues while providing the right guidance in the right place.”

Stonly says it grew by 5x in 2021, with over 20,000 businesses now using it, such as Telus, Univision, Backmarket, Gorgias, Mynd and UCLA.

Michiel Kotting, partner at Northzone and a board member added: “Now that software is essential in all walks of life, companies that truly enable their users can really pull away from the crowd.”