Yotpo Raises Another $230 Million To Ride The E-commerce Wave And Become A Brand Marketing Hub

Forbes news website reported last week that a little-known New York company that provides customer reviews and marketing tools to many well-known brands has grown into a unicorn company with a valuation of more than $1 billion. The company was founded in 2011 Yotpo, an e-commerce marketing company established in 2006.

(Yotpo official website)

As shown in the figure below, the marketing products provided by Yotpo can be mainly divided into reviews and ratings, SMS marketing, loyalty and recommendation programs, and visual UGC services. At the same time, the company's software can also enable brands to connect with Walmart, Shopify, Google, Instagram, Integration of e-commerce platforms operated by Mailchimp, Pinterest and Twitter↓

On March 18, Yotpo announced that it had completed a US$230 million Series F financing led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Tiger Global. After this round of financing, the valuation of this strong-growing company will reach US$1.4 billion.

Yotpo said its annual recurring revenue has exceeded $100 million, with annual revenue from SMS marketing products growing 170% year-on-year last year and revenue from loyalty products almost doubling.

Yotpo's current well-known brand customers include Patagonia, Steve Madden, Frank Body, Helly Hansen, Brooklinen, GYMSHARK and GoPro, but the company has also attracted many emerging DTC brands such as Princess Polly. Overall, Yotpo’s current paying customer base totals 30,000 households.

Yotpo's customers have also seen tangible performance returns.

Action camera brand GoPro began to develop DTC and subscription businesses last year. With the help of Yotpo, GoPro opened up peer-to-peer review functions for its flagship cameras to its customers. To date, GoPro has received more than 3,500 buyer reviews worldwide.

Interestingly, the Yotpo platform was originally created to solve the problem of unreliable reviews on brand websites. Ten years ago, Yotpo founder Tomer Tagrin carefully selected a DSLR camera for a friend, only to be told by his teacher that they had purchased "the worst camera they could buy."

(Tomer Tagrin, co-founder and CEO of Yotpo)

Tagrin said traditional retail success depends on "location, location, location," while e-commerce is "all about consumer attention." In order to attract people's attention, he estimates that the average brand is using 10 to 14 different marketing applications, creating a "really bad experience", so he set up Yotpo to help brands cater to all e-commerce in a single integrated platform. Marketing needs.

Princess Polly mentioned above is a DTC website for women's clothing and accessories that was founded in Australia in 2010 but has achieved rapid development in the US market. The brand uses all products of the Yotpo marketing platform.

Kim Zorn, head of performance at Princess Polly, said: “The challenge we faced was having too many different marketing tools, service providers and applications at the same time with little communication between them. Yotpo integrates all marketing tools on a single platform. method solves this problem.”

“With Yotpo, we can send review requests via SMS, reward customers with loyalty points and send specific text to members based on their loyalty level. The Yotpo platform makes it easier to communicate with our customers and helps us provide Provide customers with a better brand experience, allowing us to realize our e-commerce dream!”