Tag Archive for: strategic investor

Avokado – the online shopping service – raises a seed round

Hungarian start-up „Avokado”, what is the concept behind it?

Our days revolutionizing the FMCG e-commerce sector is not easy. The ones taking this challenge in Hungary are part of a start-up named „Avokado”. The goal is to bring a smooth and unique shopping experience to users who are enabled to shop from multiple stores while getting all delivered at once to their doorstep. On the other hand, the goal of the retailers is to enable expansion to the digital world while widening their customer base.

Avokado’s current investment

Current seed funding gave proof of Avokado’s business concept & and business model. The investor is ED Group (investment holding of Balázs Várkonyi and Gyula Kelemen). Várkonyi and Kelemen are very well-known successful entrepreneurs in the field of e-commerce which is bringing waste experience and „smart money” to the Avokado team.

Excellent founding team

Some of Avokado’s team members are Tibor Székács, Erik Barcsay and Szabina Matócza each individual with decades of experience in e-commerce. Tibor is the CEO of Avokado, coming with experience in execution & and leading the whole process of launching „Aldi” in Hungary, after which was the Group Managing Director of Hofer, responsible for more than 800 stores. Erik founded BIG FISH, an e-commerce-focused software company, that offers its services tailored to market leader players’. Kristóf is coming with the background of introducing and leading Tesco Online in Hungary. Szabina built Háda’s Webshop (Hungary’s largest second-hand fashion online store) handling 40 000 products monthly and overseeing expansion to 6 countries, other than that at Cherrisk.com she managed the international rollout, and as VP of e-commerce for 4 years overseeing the rollout to 3 countries and building the team from 6 to 70 people.

Partnering with ED Group is bringing an additional layer of expertise. Várkonyi back in 2001 year founded with his partner Extreme Digital web shop, which expanded to 9 countries. In 2019 it merged with eMAG, another regional e-commerce giant and Várkonyi became its CEO with more than 800 employees. In 2023 from eMAG group separated Vatera.hu (online auction portal) and Ingatlan.com (Hungarian local major real estate website) and Balázs announced that Vatera and Jófogas (classifieds website) would merge and become the biggest domestic used goods market. During more than 2 decades of his e-commerce industry-specific experience, he gained numerous awards and recognitions.

Steady growth in online grocery

Some of the pain points in the online shopping current market are sometimes 10-25% higher prices than in stores, logistic struggles of bigger chains that can’t cope with short delivery times, missing best-seller products online, and no same-day delivery. Current retail market trends no doubt are moving the tendencies to the growing market of online shopping experience where Avokado sees an existing gap and market niche still to fulfill.
Proof of concept is also an example of Instacart in the USA that Avokado sees as a familiar idea that they would like to tailor to the domestic market needs, said Szabina Matócza, Avokado’s Managing Director.

Our role in securing Avokado’s seed investment

Absolvo is convinced that this team can build the next possible unicorn, and that’s why we joined them on this journey. Starting now with the first step (a seed round) and accompanying them for future A/B series rounds in the not-too-distant future. Our team proudly supported them in rethinking the growth strategy, positioning the story, financial planning and then establishing talks with local and international investors, negotiating the terms, and assisting in deal signing. More and other levels of achievements are yet to come!

 

Contentsquare / Hotjar acquired the UK-based tech company PingPong UX

Our Client PingPong, the UK based UX design startup, a fully-integrated platform for UX research and user testing with 200+ clients, 175k+ testers in 100+ countries successfully closed its M&A deal with the global leader in digital experience intelligence and analytics Contentsquare.

The PingPong team and platform is technically joining forces with the Maltese-US giant user behaviour analytics company Hotjar, part of the Contentsquare portfolio, under the new branding “Hotjar Engage”.

The 6 years journey from PingPong to Hotjar Engage

PingPong was founded in 2016 with a clear mission: to simplify the user research process, breaking the „routine” of slow and fragmented process of user testing, knowing there had to be a better, more usable, more productive and more convenient way.

They started with a simple, bootstrapped prototype and had to rely on friends and family to be their testers. After 6 years of dedication and hard work they have become a powerful user-testing platform with over 175,000 testers worldwide, with big brands and large customers in their impressive client pool.

And just last year, the team at Hotjar, trusted by 1.1M+ websites in 180+ countries, started using PingPong for user research.

Their teams ended up talking, and they came to realize they shared the same vision.

Hotjar wants every business to have the power to create product experiences people love. To do that, understanding and empathizing with the people using your product is essential. That’s what PingPong is all about: making it as easy as possible to gather the face-to-face feedback you need to build a product your users will love.

With this acquisition, PingPong is changing its name to Hotjar Engage, and will be fully integrated into the Hotjar portfolio, sitting alongside Hotjar’s existing products Ask (Surveys and Feedback) and Observe (Heatmaps and Recordings), while its product features remain unchanged.

The future – never seen growth opportunities as part of the Contentsquare / Hotjar family

The global leader in digital experience intelligence and analytics Contentsquare, based in Paris, France, has grown up from one French entrepreneur in a small Parisian attic to a global team of 1,500+, has raised USD 1.4 billion investments in total (the last one this year, a Series F round of USD 600 million).

Since 2019, Contentsquare has boosted its dynamic growth by acquiring Clicktale, Pricing Assistant, Adapt My Web, Dareboost, Upstride – and the product experience insights leader Hotjar in September 2021, to deliver cutting-edge insights to businesses of all sizes and across all industries.

This acquisition opens broad perspectives and enormous growth potential for PingPong; as part of the Contentsquare / Hotjar family, they will have more resources than ever to speed up product development, add new features, and expand their pool of testers.

PingPong UX was advised by Absolvo Consulting in the transaction process with Contentsquare / Hotjar.

Source: PingPong UX blog – Hotjar has acquired PingPong