Highlights:
- The company launches a Discovery Suite, an end-to-end solution that boosts conversions by analyzing the shopper’s intent.
- Klevu combines natural language processing and artificial intelligence to create a model that suits the eCommerce industry.
Introduction:
Klevu announced closing an amount of $12 million in the Series A round. This marks the launch of the company’s Discovery Suite which is an end-to-end solution. This solution captures online shoppers’ intent to boost conversions, average order value, and loyalty. It will help fund Klevu’s Global Semantic Lab initiative which aims to develop next-generation technologies by combining machine learning and natural language processing for e-commerce.
Year over year, consumer spending in the US dipped last month. But the onset of pandemic supercharged e-commerce. According to data from IBM US Retail Index, business closures and shelter in place orders accelerated the shift to digital shopping by 5 years. Online shopping is projected to grow by 20% in 2020. The survey from BMC and Mercatus says that e-commerce grocery orders totaled $5.9 billion which grew by 3.6 % from $5.7 billion in August.
Founders of Klevu and its history:
Nilay Oza, Niraj Aswani, and Jyrki Kontio co-founded Klevu in Finland in 2013. The company e has an aim to connect people with the products they wish to buy. With the implementation of AI and natural language processing technology, the company’s products will help merchants deliver relevant experiences backed by the behavior.
Klevu says it’s such product blogs in two eCommerce platforms like Shopify and constantly learns from the user’s interaction to optimize the results. It automatically handles typing mistakes during the identification and understanding of stop words. It also adds contextually relevant synonyms in the product catalogs. Klevu also enables merchants to fine-tune search results using rules across certain categories and keywords.
The company’s complementary category merchandising product works with the trends in real-time data. This enhances the results that customers see on various product category pages.
Statement from Klevu’s spokesperson:
“Text mining is all about analyzing a piece of text and identifying hidden meaningful information from within it. At Klevu, we use several AI techniques to make this happen in the eCommerce domain,” a spokesperson said via email. “Our objective is to enrich the catalog with the information, originally missing in the catalog, that the shoppers may search for … In our training data, we have millions of products from 45 different industries and in 30 different languages. The product data is systematically organized with various product attributes and images associated with each product. This data is then further enhanced, automatically, with an average of 10 million shopping signals collected daily directly from the high-intent shoppers to understand how they search, locate products, and use them.”
Conversion still remains a challenge as far as The E-Commerce space is concerned even though the pandemic increased the growth. As of Q1 2019, only 2.72 percent of e-commerce website visits saw conversions according to Statista. In another report, KPMG stressed the need to promote relevant products at the time of check out which can impact the buying decisions.
Statement from Puma, Klevu’s customer:
Klevu customer Puma says it encountered a 50% increase in search led conversions on one of its websites after it adopted the platform. Besides Puma, Klevu says, more than 3000 brands have made over 5 billion API to its product. These brands include Yamaha, Callaway, and Jack Daniel.
“Amazon is popular for product discovery, and Google for its content,” Oza said via email. “Klevu marries these two together to provide a seamless shopping journey. This way, we ensure that we serve the consumer, the most relevant products and provide high engagement. With this investment, we are well-positioned toward our mission of democratizing discovery in online retail. Therefore, we will further invest into strengthening our leadership in machine learning- and natural language processing-led innovations. This is for online retail that bring data-driven business success for our customers.”
The funding round details:
Alfvén & Didrikson led Klevu’s latest funding round, with participation from existing investors EVLI Growth Partners, Jerry Pruttz Holding, and Jonas Dromberg. Klevu has about 90 employees across offices in various places. These locations include places like the UK, US, India, Australia, and Sweden in addition to Finland. The company has successfully raised over $17.5 million to date.
