Yotpo raises another $230 million to ride the e-commerce wave and become a brand marketing hub

According to a report by Forbes news website last week, 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 over $1 billion . This company is Yotpo, an e-commerce marketing company founded in 2011 .

(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 integrate with e-commerce platforms operated by Walmart, Shopify, Google, Instagram, Mailchimp, Pinterest and Twitter ↓

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

Yotpo ’s current clients include Patagonia, Steve Madden, Frank Body, Helly Hansen, Brooklinen, GYMSHARK, and GoPro , but the company has also attracted a number of emerging DTC brands such as Princess Polly . In total, Yotpo’s current paying customer base totals 30,000 households.

Yotpo’s clients are also seeing tangible performance returns.

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

Interestingly, Yotpo was created to solve the problem of unreliable reviews on brand websites. Ten years ago, Tomer Tagrin, the founder of Yotpo, carefully selected a digital SLR camera for a friend, but was told by his teacher that they had bought "the worst camera they could buy."

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

Tagrin said that traditional retail success depends on "location, location, location," while e-commerce is "all about consumer attention." To attract people's attention, he estimated that the average brand is using 10 to 14 different marketing applications, creating a "really bad experience," so he decided to found Yotpo to help brands meet all their e-commerce marketing needs in a single integrated platform.

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

“Our challenge was having too many different marketing tools, service providers, and apps that didn’t talk to each other,” said Kim Zorn, head of Performance at Princess Polly . “ Yotpo’s approach of integrating all of our marketing tools into a single platform solved that problem.”

" With Yotpo, we can send review requests via SMS, reward customers based on loyalty points, and send specific texts to members based on their loyalty levels. The Yotpo platform makes it easier for us to communicate with our customers and provide them with a better brand experience, which allows us to realize our e-commerce dream!"

Yotpo

E-commerce Marketing