Even with all the years of work that have been put into improving how screen-based interfaces work, our experiences with websites, mobile apps and any other interactive service you might use still often come up short: we can\u2019t find what we want, we\u2019re bombarded with exactly what we don\u2019t need or the flow is just buggy in one way or another.<\/p>\n
Now, FullStory<\/a>, one of the startups that\u2019s built a platform to identify when all of the above happens and provide suggestions to publishers for fixing it \u2014 it\u2019s obsessed enough with the issue that it went so far as to trademark the phrase \u201cRage Clicks\u201d, the focus of its mission \u2014 is announcing a big round of funding, a sign of its success and ambitions to do more.<\/p>\n The Atlanta-based company has closed a Series D round of $103 million, an oversubscribed round that actually was still growing between me interviewing the company and publishing this story (when we talked last week the figure was $100 million). Permira\u2019s growth fund \u2014 which has previously invested in other customer experience startups like Klarna and Nexthink \u2014 is leading this round, with previous investors Kleiner Perkins, GV, Stripes, Dell Technologies Capital, Salesforce Ventures and Glynn Capital also participating.<\/p>\n FullStory, which has raised close to $170 million to date, has confirmed that the investment values the company at $1.8 billion.<\/p>\n Scott Voigt, FullStory\u2019s founder and CEO, tells me that FullStory currently has some 3,100 paying customers on its books across verticals like retail, SaaS, finance and travel (customers include Peloton, the Financial Times, VMware and JetBlue), which collectively are on course to rack up more than 15 billion user sessions this year \u2014 working out to 1 trillion interactions involving clicks, navigations, highlights, scrolls and frustration signals. It says that annual recurring revenue has to date risen by more than 70% year-on-year.<\/p>\n The plan now will be to continue investing in RD to bring more real-time intelligence into its products, \u201cand pass those insights on to customers,\u201d and also to \u201cmove more aggressively into Europe and Asia Pacific,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n FullStory competes with others like Glassbox and Decibel, although it also claims its tools have more presence on websites than its three biggest competitors combined.<\/p>\n Working across different divisions like product, customer success and marketing, and engineering, FullStory uses machine learning algorithms to analyze how people navigate websites and other digital interfaces.<\/p>\n If approved as part of the \u201cconsent gate\u201d you might encounter because of, say, GDPR regulations, it then tracks things like when people are clicking in areas excessively over a short period of time because of delays (the so-called \u201crage clicks\u201d); or when a click leads nowhere because of, for example, a blip in a piece of JavaScript; or when a person is just scrolling or moving their mouse or cursor or finger in a frustrated (fast) way \u2014 again with little or no subsequent activity (or activity from the customer ceasing altogether) resulting from it. It doesn\u2019t use<\/em> \u2014 nor does it have plans to \u2014 use eye tracking, or anything like sentiment analysis around data that customers put into, say, customer response windows.<\/p>\n FullStory then packages up the insights that it does collect into data streams that can be used with various visualization tools (having Salesforce as a strategic backer is interesting in this regard, given that it owns Tableau), or spreadsheets, or whatever a customer chooses to put them into. While it doesn\u2019t offer direct remediation (perhaps an area it could tackle in the future), it does offer suggestions for alternative actions to fix whatever problems are arising.<\/p>\n