Venture Capital Startup Yotpo Hires Former GoDaddy Executive To Lead Upscale Expansion
The tech startup Yotpo has signaled its ambitions for expansion by recruiting a high-ranking executive from GoDaddy, the World’s largest domain name registrar. Miguel Lopez, who spent five years as Vice President of Customer Care at GoDaddy has now been installed as Yopot’s Vice President of Client Services.
Yotpo is looking to grow its client base and recruited a figurehead with proven experience managing and building large-scale service teams. “Yotpo is an innovative company and a leader in the marketing space,” said Lopez, “I’m ready to lead the charge for them to provide A class service to their user base and find the best ways to help Yotpo clients maximize the power of their user-generated content.” Tomer Tagrin, Yotpo CEO, said, “As growth continues to accelerate, we are extremely focused on building the people infrastructure for scale.”
Yotpo is a tech company that started as a platform for its clients to engage online customers through reviews. Online reviews that are verified and genuine can be a central component in establishing a brand’s reputation and consumer trust, but customers are not always engaged to the extent that they will publish and share those reviews. A study by Saurage Research found that 84 percent of Americans said consumer reviews did influence their decisions when buying products, but only 28 percent said they had actually written reviews.
Today, its client base stands at 150,000 companies. The company has also expanded its scope to go beyond just offering a reviews platform, and is developing new technologies that help companies engage customers more deeply, optimize search engine results, and enhance branding.
Through data and analytics, Yotpo can identify optimal methods that will encourage users to generate original content. Different types of customers have unique patterns of behavior; for example, users in Germany tended not to review products on weekends, meaning email targeting needs to occur during the week. Users purchasing electronics take, on average, four times longer to write a product review, compared to those purchasing a fashion product. By extracting these trends from the data, companies can know when and how to best engage specific types of customers to have the best chance of getting a post-purchase review.
In 2014, Yotpo completed a round of investment, securing $10.7 million. The round was led by Blumberg Capital, an early-stage U.S. venture capital firm that specializes in providing the seed or series funding to technology companies in the software, digital and social media, mobile and consumer Internet industries. In 2015, Yotpo raised a further $15 million, bringing its total backing to $30 million.
Founded in 1991 and headquartered in San Francisco with team members in New York and Israel, Blumberg Capital is managed by David Blumberg, founder and managing partner. Prior investors such as Rhodium, Gandyr Group, Oliver Jung and 2B Angels, Magna Capital Partners and Plus Ventures. Zohar Gilon also participated in the 2014 round. The funding has been deployed to double its employee headcount and expand Yotpo’s U.S. offices in San Francisco and New York, as 55 percemt of its customers are based in the U.S., 30 percent are in Europe and the remainder are distributed globally.
Adelman joined Go Daddy as the Vice President of Corporate Development and went on to hold executive positions in product development, customer care and business development at the company. During his decade at GoDaddy, the company grew sales to over $1.2 billion. In 2011, the company was sold to SilverLake Partners, KKR, and TCV in a transaction valued at $2.25 billion.
Before joining Go Daddy, Adelman held a number of senior positions in the technology market including CEO of NeoPlanet, a customer interaction software company where he built partnerships with Compaq, USA Networks, MTV, Universal Studios, New Line Cinema and others. Adelman was also President of Strategic Relations at Network Associates (now McAfee) and Vice President of Business Development at Bigfoot International, a leader in marketing automation technologies.
[Image via Yotpo.com]
