Whole storywhich sells analytics tools for apps and websites, secured $25 million in new equity financing, documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission this week shows. TechCrunch could not independently confirm investors, and the company had not responded to a request for comment at press time. But according to Crunchbase, the infusion is FullStory’s first since August 2021 and brings the company’s total raised to around $200 million.
Atlanta-based FullStory was founded in 2014 by Bruce Johnson, Joel Webber, and Scott Voigt, who sought to create a product that helps brands create better customer experiences across web and mobile. Before launching FullStory, the co-founders — all Georgia Institute of Technology graduates — teamed up in the early 2000s to start a DevOps company called Innuvo, which was acquired by Google in 2005 for an undisclosed sum.
Originally designed as a marketing tool, FullStory turned to analytics, customer success, and engineering after the co-founders realized that the tool they had created to understand why their initial idea didn’t work had commercial potential.
Today, FullStory collects and structures digital experience data and uses AI to glean behavioral insights. The platform tracks signals such as highlights, scroll depths, pinch-to-zoom rate, and copy-and-paste, displaying metrics and reconstructing a user’s journey with vector graphics. FullStory can also search through a range of possible “friction events” to see how often they correlate with failure to convert (i.e. achieving a desired goal, such as making purchases). Saved reports and automated alerts, meanwhile, track progress and highlight anomalies, such as when a click goes nowhere due to a blip in a JavaScript snippet.
FullStory claims its approach provides an easy way to understand whether a customer, for example, is comparison shopping or simply researching. In a previous interview, Voigt said a home improvement supplier used FullStory to identify a spike in garage rug sales during the pandemic and update its marketing materials accordingly.
An overview of FullStory’s digital customer experience tracking dashboard. Picture credits: Whole story
The pandemic-spurred digital transformation efforts have been a boon for FullStory, which currently has more than 3,200 customers, including Groupon, Automattic, Peloton, Fidelity and JetBlue. In 2021, the company – which has secured support from VCs including Permira, Kleiner PerkinsGV, Stripes, Dell Technologies Capital and Salesforce Ventures — claims to have increased annual recurring revenue by more than 70% year over year.
FullStory claims to have analyzed over 15 billion user sessions in 2021, including nearly 1 trillion clicks, text highlights and scrolls.
“As people increasingly manage their work and personal lives online, businesses across all industries have embraced FullStory for the information they need to deliver premium digital products and experiences,” said Voigt in a press release. recent Press release. “FullStory’s comprehensive DXI platform provides a single view of real user behavior and highlights ‘unknown unknowns’ to drive product analysis, UX research, conversion optimization and more.”
Building differentiated digital experiences is simply a challenge. Fifty-eight percent of customers think most brands’ experiences have little to no impact on what they end up buying and nearly half can’t tell the difference between experiences, according to a Gartner report. survey. Part of the problem lies with the C suite, which continues to push for digital experiences without extensive bug testing and without fully understanding what would motivate their customers to try them.
Dead links, glitches, and unsubmitted forms can litter apps and company websites. Not only do these present barriers to work and play, but they can also lead to overwhelmed customer service teams, staff shortages, and hour-long wait times. Clients rarely forgive — 64% admit to have jumped on a competitor following a bad customer experience.
The demand for more thoughtful deployments has benefited not only FullStory, but also competitors in the field of digital customer experience analytics, such as Clootrack. Glass box and Decibel are perhaps the most formidable, having raised tens of millions in venture capital between them.
Keen to set the pace (or at least keep it going), FullStory expanded its leadership team in 2021, hiring Edelita Tichepco as chief financial officer and Google veteran Jim Miller as vice president of recruiting. Will Schnabel has also joined the company as senior vice president of alliances and partnerships, bringing his experience building partnerships and integrations from his time at Accenture and IBM Watson.
FullStory also more than doubled its workforce in 2021 to more than 500 employees, with teams around the world including San Francisco, London, Sydney and Singapore beyond Atlanta.
