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No marketer likes a bad customer review, and customer marketing platform Oquendo today announced $26 million in Series A funding to continue developing its customer review tools for e-commerce brands.
Base10 Partners led the funding and was joined by Craft Ventures and existing investors Index Ventures. It gives the company $33.5 million in total capital raised to date.
Matthew Goodman, founder and CEO of Okendo Image Credits: Oquendo
Matthew Goodman and co-founder Matt Garven started Okendo in 2019 after working together at VidTitan, Goodman’s company that collected video testimonials and reviews from customers for Shopify merchants. They found the e-commerce sector to be the sector that attracted Vidtitan the most, and which led the company to Oquendo.
Today, the company operates direct-to-consumer merchants with more than 5,000 consumer brands working primarily on Shopify to attract more consumers, drive sales and increase customer lifetime value. Clients include Skims, Haus, Crunchyroll, Magic Spoon, Frame, Nomad, Buck Mason and Liquid Death.
Here’s how it works: Oquendo enables merchants to collect high-impact content directly from customers, including product ratings and reviews, customer-generated photos and videos, questions and answers, and other customer data such as preferences and behaviors.
Those merchants can display the ratings and reviews on their website or social media to tell personalized marketing stories.
“Marketers can use the power of their customers to increase confidence, drive change and deliver better performance and customer experiences,” Goodman told TechCrunch.
Recent tests by Oquendo show that, on average, consumers who interact with the devices have a 2.5x higher conversion rate and a 15% higher average order value.
Given the competition out there, Goodman considers Oquendo’s closest competition to e-commerce marketing company Yotpo, which raised $230 million in funding last year. But he says his company differentiates itself by taking a customer-centric approach and focusing on that Shopify community, which means deeper integration and better use of marketplace technologies. As a result, merchants can easily customize and deploy Okendo.
“We also have a way to combine the use of customer audit data to deliver personalized content, collect invitations, and generate customer content combined with that unique approach to mobile-first content collection. Coming up with some different tailored elements to maximize the amount of content we collect,” added Goodman.
The company employs 83 people across Australia and the US. Over the past 12 months, the company has doubled its annual recurring revenue.
The new funding will allow Oquendo to accelerate its go-to-market and product development, which includes some launches lined up for late 2022. The company has expanded to North America in early 2021, so the capital injection will help with expansion. Goodman plans to add 50 roles to the team this year across all divisions, but specifically in engineering, sales and marketing.
TJ Nahigian, managing partner at Base10 Partners, says that his company has made about nine investments in the e-commerce category, and identified Oquendo as a leader in evaluations.
“We’ve learned that this is more than just a customer review platform, that it’s the first iteration, but that there’s a desire to change that,” Nahijian told TechCrunch. “We’ve seen how much ROI we get when we talk to customers. It’s more and more important for merchants to get closer to their customers to build credibility, sell products and build trust, and Oquendo is the No. 1 platform and product in our minds to do that.”
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