Israeli Yotpo, which provides a platform for brand marketing through user reviews, announces a $ 51 million fund raising. The round was led by Claltech, Israel’s technological investment arm of billionaire Len Blavatnik’s Access Industries. Daniel Shinar, CEO of ClalTech, will join Yotfo’s board.
The current round included the Vertex fund, a new addition to the company’s investors and the full participation of current investors: Bessemer, Marker LLC, Vintage, Blumberg Capital, Rhodium, 2B-Angels.
Founded in 2011 by Omri Cohen and Tomer Tagrin, Yotpo provides a platform with authentic rather than fake reviews of products by consumers. The company has raised $101 million to date including $22 million earlier this year and $15 million last year.
Will you offer us a hand? Every gift, regardless of size, fuels our future.
Your critical contribution enables us to maintain our independence from shareholders or wealthy owners, allowing us to keep up reporting without bias. It means we can continue to make Jewish Business News available to everyone.
You can support us for as little as $1 via PayPal at [email protected].
Thank you.
Yotpo employs 270 people in Israel and in New York City, and another 150 employees will be recruited during the coming year.
According to the company, the products are installed in 200,000 active sites with entries from 200 million different computers or mobile products each month, totaling more than half a billion monthly views.
The company develops a platform for reading, writing and sharing opinions on products on electronic trading sites. The same platform is designed to help companies market themselves through the same content created by customers, whether in writing, photos, videos or Q & A. In order to encourage customers to take part, the platform allows surfers to participate in programs of benefits on commercial sites.
Yotpo says that the platform increases sales by 5% to 15%. Yotpo is an acronym for Your Opinion, the Public Opinion.
“We live in a post-amazonian world where even established brands and giant companies are collapsing from being unable to cope with Amazon’s low prices and performance,” said Tomer Tagrin, CEO and co-founder of Yotpo. The only consumer marketing brands that will survive are those who can compete by building a quality customer experience and an authentic brand that people can talk about. ”
The company intends to use the funds raised to develop the platform and continue its global expansion by opening a second headquarters in the US and recruiting 150 additional employees to its offices in Tel Aviv, New York, and London. Yotpo reported that its revenues have quadrupled in the past 20 months. The large demand for salespeople and programmers in the company was caused by massive growth of hundreds of percent in the past year, so demand for the company’s products may grow beyond the “hands of the company”.
