Content Analytics Raises $4 Million in Series A Funding to Scale Its eCommerce Optimization Solution

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Sep 24, 2014) - Content Analytics, an eCommerce analytics platform that recommends optimization strategies across millions of SKUs and listings for major retailers and brands, today announced that Almaz Capital has led a $4 million Series A funding. Also joining in the round for the first time is dunnhumby Ventures, the venture capital arm of UK-based dunnhumby, a customer science company with many large B-to-C clients currently building out their eCommerce strategies. Content Analytics had previously raised $1.5 million from founders, angels and seed funds including Visionnaire Ventures, Zetta Venture Partners and WTI along with Dr. Eric Hahn, Nancy Schoendorf, Jonathan Feiber and several others. 

Content Analytics will use the investment to scale sales and marketing, expand the customer base of brands and retailers globally, and grow the engineering team.

The company was founded by David Feinleib, a Big Data expert and author of Big Data Bootcamp and producer of The Big Data Landscape. Feinleib leads the company as CEO, and is a successful serial entrepreneur with prior exits to HP and EMC. In addition to Feinleib, the leadership team includes Jeff Green, Director of Engineering, who is a leader in machine learning and analytics. Green formerly held positions at SAP Labs, NavalResearch Laboratory, and NASA Ames Research Center.

To be successful, online retailers and brands must ensure that the most relevant products are shown at the moment of discovery, and consumers are provided with rich content about the products they're evaluating. But large eCommerce sites are overwhelmed with volume -- with millions of items to constantly mange; while brands must contend with tracking how their brands are being displayed across a myriad of sites.

Content Analytics provides an analytics solution for each that quickly pinpoint SKUs that have weak rankings or content that can be optimized. Once users are on the site, Content Analytics provides insight on the combinations of products that are frequently purchased together, the optimum content descriptor density, and how well the site is performing vis-a-vis competitive sites.

The growth in eCommerce is fueling the need for this solution, with the number of products sold through online sites expected to grow more than 10 fold over the next several years.

"eCommerce sites typically have millions of SKUs they must manage, supplied by hundreds of vendors. Optimizing content is usually confined to a small subset of listings," Feinleib explained. "Similarly, brands often have multiple SKUs listed on dozens -- if not hundreds -- of eCommerce sites with little insight into how they're displayed across each. We put the power back in brand managers' hands and ensure that retailers who currently don't provide an easy, robust shopping experience online won't be left behind."

The company also announced that Geoffrey Baehr, a general partner at Almaz Capital, has joined the Board of Directors.

"We always look to invest in companies with a differentiated technology and a team with an in-depth understanding of the problem they are trying to solve," Baehr said. "David Feinleib and the rest of the company have this in spades. They have applied extensive Natural Language processing skills, algorithms, and analytics in a way that does not affect site performance. In a short amount of time they have demonstrated the power of their technology and engaged some of the world's leading retailers and brands."

"We work with clients all over the world to help them leverage the understanding of their customers to optimize their business. eCommerce is the next big frontier in this effort," said Dave Balter, Global Head of Investments, dunnhumby. "The company's technology boosts performance of eCommerce sites by ensuring that every product is optimized for consumers to find and buy. Its solution is aimed at eCommerce and brand managers so that they can quickly pinpoint listings that are poorly represented -- whether lacking product descriptions, missing images, or saddled with poorly worded titles -- and provides recommendations on how to improve."

About Content Analytics, Inc.
Content Analytics provides the precise insights that online retailers and brands need to compete. Using proprietary data crawler technology to collect vast troves of eCommerce data, Content Analytics' sophisticated natural language processing algorithms match products across sites, instantly producing metrics that can be used to promote products to produce maximum demand, augment product assortment, ensure product naming generates the highest clickthrough rates, and descriptors that boost ratings and listings. For more information, visit http://www.contentanalyticsinc.com.

About Almaz Capital
Founded in 2008, Almaz Capital invests in early stage, capital efficient technology companies. The team connects entrepreneurs and engineering talent in untapped emerging tech regions working in high-growth sectors such as enterprise and cloud computing, mobile, internet infrastructure and services, data storage and management, and ecommerce. The fund's investors include Cisco, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), and International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group. The following companies are among Almaz Capital's realized exits: nScaled acquired by Acronis in 2014; Vyatta, acquired by Brocade in 2012; Qik, acquired by Skype in 2011; and Yandex, IPO 2011. Recent investments include: Starwind Software; Cinarra funded along with Cisco; If You Can funded along with Greylock Partners; Nival; GridGain; and Sensity, funded along with Radar Partners and Mohr Davidow Ventures. For more information, please visit http://www.almazcapital.com

About dunnhumby Ventures
dunnhumby Ventures is a seed-stage venture fund focusing on retail technology, investing in and accelerating startups that embrace data for innovations along the customer's path to purchase. Backed by the global leader in customer science, with a database of shopping behavior for more than 660 million households worldwide, dunnhumby Ventures is looking to break all the rules and shape the future of retail.