No merchant likes a bad customer review and okendoa customer marketing platform, today announced $26 million in Series A funding to continue developing its customer review tools for ecommerce brands.

Base10 Partners led the funding round and was joined by Craft Ventures and existing investor Index Ventures. It gives the company $33.5 million in total capital raised to date.

Matthew Goodman, co-founder and CEO of Okendo Image Credits: okendo

Matthew Goodman and co-founder Matt Garven started Okendo in 2019 after working together at VidTitan, a company Goodman started that was an app for Shopify merchants to collect video testimonials and customer reviews. They found that e-commerce was the industry that had the most traction for VidTitan and the company evolved into Okendo.

Today, the company partners with more than 5,000 consumer brands, primarily direct-to-consumer merchants operating on Shopify, to attract more shoppers, drive sales, and increase lifetime customer value. Clients include Skims, Haus, Crunchyroll, Magic Spoon, Frame, Nomad, Buck Mason, and Liquid Death.

Here’s how it works: Okendo allows merchants to collect quality content directly from customers, including product ratings and reviews, customer-generated photos and videos, questions and answers, and other individual points of customer data such as preferences and behavior.

Those sellers can then display the ratings and reviews on their website or on social media to tell more personalized marketing stories.

“Sellers can use the power of their customers to build trust, drive conversion, and deliver better performance and customer experiences,” Goodman told australiabusinessblog.com.

Recent tests conducted by Okendo showed that shoppers who interacted with the tools had an average 2.5x higher conversion rate and a 15% higher average order value.

As for the competition, Goodman considers Yotpo, an e-commerce marketing firm that raised $230 million in funding last year, to be Okendo’s closest competitor. However, he says his company differentiates itself by taking a customer-centric approach and focusing on that Shopify community, meaning it can have deeper integration and better use of the market’s technologies. As a result, merchants can more easily adapt and deploy Okendo.

“We also have a unique approach to how we generate customer content, combining the use of customer audit data to deliver more personalized content, collection invites, and a unique approach to content collection with a mobile-first approach. along with a number of different gamified elements to maximize the amount of content we collect,” Goodman added.

The company employs 83 people in Australia and the United States. In the past 12 months, the company has doubled its annual recurring revenue.

The new funding will enable Okendo to accelerate its go-to-market and product development, including some releases slated for late 2022. The company also expanded into North America in early 2021, so the capital infusion will help with expansion. Goodman plans to add 50 roles to the team this year, spanning all departments, including engineering, sales and marketing.

TJ Nahigian, managing partner at Base10 Partners, says his company has made about nine investments in the e-commerce category, and has identified Okendo as a leader in ratings.

“We learned that this was much more than just a customer review platform, that this was the first wedge, but there was a desire to make it much more,” Nahigian told australiabusinessblog.com. “When we spoke to customers, we saw how much ROI they were getting. It is increasingly important for merchants to get closer to their customers to build credibility, sell products and build trust, and Okendo is by far the #1 platform and product in our minds to do that.”