Zarget raises Series A funding of $6mn led by Sequoia Capital
Zarget, the SaaS platform that provides analytics and insights on increasing conversions and transactions, today raised Series A funding of $6 million. The round was led by Sequoia Capital India with participation from existing investors Accel and Matrix Partners.
This is the second round of funding to have been raised by Zarget. Earlier this year, the startup had raised $1.5 million from Accel Partners, Matrix Partners, and angel investor Girish Mathrubootham. The funds were used for product development and R&D.
The investment
The company plans to use the funds to scale its marketing automation products and help small businesses easily optimise their web presence in real time without any coding skills.
Tarun Dhavda, Managing Director, Matrix India, believes,
Zarget offers the foremost integrated platform that provides small and medium businesses a comprehensive and affordable way to scale conversions with a superior customer experience.
Speaking of the investment, he adds that as the market for marketing automation software grows globally, Zarget’s founding team — Arvind Parthiban, Naveen Venkat, and Santhosh Kumar — is possibly one of the most seasoned teams to work in the space.
“As early seed investors, we look forward to continuing working with the team to help them further expand the business globally and become a true category leader,” adds Tarun.
Zarget was launched on Product Hunt last December, instantly receiving over 1,500 signups and with 400 companies actively using the platform. Arvind adds that the all-in-one aspect of Zarget helps any business owner become an effective digital marketer and instantly improve the performance of his/her website.
Product growth
“They don’t have to learn to code or work on expensive hires and an IT department. The platform offers all A/B testing, funnel analysis, dynamic heatmaps, form analysis, and user polls and feedback, at 10 percent of the cost and complete customer support.”
The SaaS tool comes as a Google Chrome plugin which sits on the user's browser providing them information in real time.
Zarget charges customers based on the number of active visitors on the client's website. All three functionalities are free for the first 5,000 unique visitors, post which there is a standard and professional plan with charges applicable.
The standard plan has heatmap and funnel analysis as features and costs $15 for every 10,000 visitors on the client website. The professional plan comes with all three features and costs $35 for the same number of users.
The firm also offers discounts (close to 20 percent) on their monthly and annual plans.
Within this one year, Zarget now operates out of India and San Francisco and claims to have over more than 1,000 customer signups across 10 countries within four months of its launch. Some of Zarget’s clients include UK-based BizTalk360, Brazil-based Buscapé, and US-based LANDESK.
While the team refused to share their revenue figures, they claim to be growing at 200 percent month on month.
“We are looking to build two major modules in the marketing automation and optimisation space — website personalisation and a mobile app optimisation tool. This is expected to release in six to eight months’ time,” says Arvind.
Speaking of the investment, Shailesh Lakhani, Managing Director, Sequoia Capital India Advisors, said that Sequoia is excited to partner with a strong team with such proven capabilities. He adds that they believe their marketing platform will become an essential fixture within the SMB market.
The market and differentiator
Speaking from personal experience at Zoho, Arvind adds that websites are the biggest marketing channel for SMBs. However, the entrepreneurs behind these businesses lack the IT knowledge, time, or budget to manage and improve the performance of the web pages. He explains,
“On top of this, none of the optimisation software today works for HTML5 dynamic elements such as image carousels, animation, and pop-up menus, which are used in the vast majority of websites. Another major problem stems from trying to decide on the right combination of tool providers.”
According to a report by iSPIRT’s iSPIx, India has over 500 SaaS startups, which are earning revenues of $600 million, and the top 30 employ over 21,000 people and have crossed over $10 billion in valuation.
It also identifies relationship management, data visualisation, and marketing to be among the sectors with the largest opportunities in the near future, therefore making it an optimum time for marketing automation and conversion rate optimisation startups like Zarget to hit the market.
Arvind believes that while several competing products and offerings exist, they aren’t integrated like Zarget. He adds that this means the companies need to use different providers for different needs.
This, in turn, leaves the data in silos, and there isn’t an easy way to address an online behaviour pattern, thus having an impact in terms of loss of revenue and merchandise being left in the shopping cart.
Anand Krishnamoorthy, CEO of Wedtree, an online store for wedding gifts, says,
Although we did not have the resources of a full-fledged marketing team, we were able to create page variants quickly, with the confidence of knowing exactly what to do. As an example, after replacing the product category images with the individual products we saw a powerful spike with clickthrough rates increasing by a whopping 54 percent.