AB Tasty raises $40 million to optimize e-commerce user experience

AB Tasty has raised a new $40 million funding round led by Credit Mutuel Innovation with existing investors Korelya Capital, Omnes, Partech and XAnge also participating. Overall the startup has raised $64 million.

The startup is focused on improving user experience on e-commerce platforms, travel portals, fashion websites and more. It lets you customize the message and the feature set of your application depending on the person you're interacting with.

AB Tasty started the fundraising process at the end of last year and managed to close this funding round around the end of April. We were supposed to close the round by the end of March and then coronavirus hit, which delayed the closing a bit," co-founder and CEO Alix de Sagazan told me. But it seems like lockdowns didn't derail the startup.

At first, AB Tasty was a web analytics agency. In 2013, the company started working on a software-as-a-service product with a simple testing product - hence the name AB Tasty. But it evolved beyond that with a recommendation engine.

Integrating AB Tasty on your website works pretty much like integrating Google Analytics. You insert a single line of JavaScript code on every page of your site. It lets you learn a ton of information about your visitors and sort them into buckets - for European users, they'd have to give their consent in the GDPR module. You can separate engaged users from casual wanderers, you can identify customers who have been on your site for a while, etc.

After that, you can act on those segments to send personalized messages. For instance, you could give a discount to users who have a loyalty card using dynamic widgets.

More recently, AB Tasty has been trying to make it easier to roll out new features and customize an app for a specific audience. It lets you hide features behind flags and trigger them depending on multiple conditions. For instance, you could progressively roll out a new feature to 10% of your user base, then 20% of your user base, etc. You could also hide features that aren't available in some countries.

Overall, AB Tasty is trying to increase your average basket size, upsell your customers with other products, make customers come back more often and generate more revenue.

Originally from France, AB Tasty now has teams in many different countries, such as Germany, the U.K., Spain, Singapore and the U.S. I moved to New York in September 2018. It's been nearly two years and we've had tremendous growth since I arrived in the U.S.," Alix de Sagazan said.

Revenue in the U.S. has jumped by 480% over the past two years and 60% of the company's revenue now comes from outside of France. The company has around 900 clients, such as Le Bon Coin, LVMH, L'Oreal, Carrefour, Leclerc, Oui.SNCF, Sephora, Disneyland Paris, etc.