Quantum Metric, a platform that helps companies improve their websites and apps by gleaning continuous real-time feedback from end users, has raised $200 million in a series B round of funding led by Insight Partners. This gives the Colorado Springs-based company a valuation of “just above” $1 billion.
Founded in 2015, Quantum Metric uses what it calls a “continuous product design” (CPD) approach to enable businesses to iterate and “build digital products faster.” The philosophy borrows somewhat from established agile development and design processes that focus on improving efficiency through adopting continual, flexible responses to change.
A data play
Working with myriad enterprises spanning retail, insurance, financial services, telecommunications, travel, and more, Quantum Metric captures data at the session level, enabling it to “replay” individual customer interactions and see exactly what they experienced and how they reacted. This can give valuable insights into areas that need to be addressed, revealing where there may have been an API failure, slow pages, error messages, or issues adding items to a cart.
Above: Quantum Metric replay
Quantum Metric can also track behavioral metrics to automatically pinpoint design issues that are specific to a particular platform, where there might not be any particular “technical” flaw. If users are rapidly scrolling through a badly designed date-picker, or if they’re “rage-clicking” an element that they mistakenly believe to be a button to make a payment, Quantum Metric can determine that these behaviors are notably higher for Safari users on iPhone, for example. But more than that, it can also show that the reason comes down to the user force-reloading the page due to a confusing design.
“By automating this process, we’ve reduced the time to identify and resolve the issue from days or weeks to minutes,” Quantum Metric CEO Mario Ciabarra told VentureBeat.
At its core, Quantum Metric is ultimately about applying machine intelligence to big data with a view toward identifying important, actionable insights. “The problem we’re solving is that there’s too much data in large organizations and every team has their preferred tool, data set, and view of the data,” Ciabarra said. “The data structure across all of these tools is so variable that teams can’t even agree on the basics, like entries, bounce rates, or conversion. For example, many of our customers come to us and already have tools for web analytics, session replay, application performance monitoring, and customer surveys. However, using these tools does not mean that teams are proactive about finding and addressing issues on their site.”
Quantum Metric uses Google BigQuery to store and analyze customer data, allowing it to query petabytes of information to derive insights. This enables companies to track key performance indicators (KPIs) after each new feature or product release, for example, and even calculate how much money a business may have lost due to issues with a website. Slow pages could lead customers to bail out at the checkout stage.
Above: Quantum Metric: Page performance costs
Busy space
Quantum Metric had previously raised $51 million, including a $25 million series A round led by Insight Partners back in 2018 and $25 million in debt financing last year. Beside Insight Partners, Quantum Metrics’ seed investor Uncorrelated Ventures also participated in the series B round.
There are a number of similar players operating in Quantum Metric’s space, including VC-backed FullStory, which raised $10 million; Contentsquare, which raised a chunky $190 million; and Decibel, which secured $40 million — all three companies announced their fresh funding rounds during the heart of the pandemic in May 2020. As a side point, Contentsquare revealed last year that it had filed a patent infringement complaint against both Quantum Metric and Decibel, alleging unauthorized use of patented technologies including session replays and heatmaps. That case is still in its early stages, with Contentsquare seeking a jury trial.
What is most clear from this flurry of activity, however, is that the digital UX analytics space is hot, with businesses across the spectrum doubling down on their digital strategies as customers rush to ecommerce.
“The pandemic had a tremendous impact on so many of our customers’ operations, as they had to quickly pivot their attention and resources to meeting demand for digital channels,” Ciabarra explained. “It also exposed a lot of issues and frustration among customers who might have been turning to digital for their first time. As digital became the primary — and at times, the only — channel, optimizing digital experiences went from a nice-to-have to must-have.”
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