Ariadne Capital, which invests in digital technology start-ups, has just closed a GBP500,000 funding round for Taggstar making it the 8th company in its portfolio and its 4th deal in 2014.
Taggstar is also backed by Sir Stuart Rose, Rob Hersov, and Nigel Taee.
Taggstar is designed to allos shoppers to benefit from social trends by seeing how many others are buying a particular product at the same time as they shop, highlighting when it's selling fast, giving them confidence to purchase.
Taggstar will continue its rapid expansion with retailers and travel sites. Over the past year, Taggstar has worked with large retailers such as Shop Direct and Thomas Cook in addition to many other high volume consumer sites.
Taggstar is led by Andrew Lucas, Chief Technology Officer, with 20+ years of IT experience and the Marjorie Leonidas, Managing Director who spent 10 years in BT Retail building the successful BT WiFi business, and is known throughout the industry for ‘monetising WIFI’.
Taggstar uses its Trend Detection Algorithm TDA Engine (Taggstar proprietary tool) to analyse the rate at which items are selling fast. This is not just for the best-sellers but for sites with over 40k products, where many hot-selling items may get lost, it helps drive up their popularity. Taggstar provides software to report on audience size and purchasing data in real-time, compiling and mapping data points in a web-based dashboard helping retailers to review their uplift on revenue on products that displayed the Taggstar messaging.
Taggstar will now make Christmas a boom for UK retailers websites following its recent success on Black Friday, the biggest online shopping day ever. Taggstar helped one of UK’s biggest online retailers substantially increase customer conversions and revenues. While many online retailers experienced website crashes in the shopping frenzy, Taggstar delivered the required technical support and scale to one of the largest shopping websites in the UK to deliver 300 messages per second and the ability to track 36,000 simultaneously shopping on the retailer’s site.
Amit Pau, Partner, Ariadne Capital Entrepreneurs Fund, says: “Taggstar is part of the value chain of e-commerce supporting retail platforms in delivering a significant ROI and stronger engagement with customers. It helps build customer loyalty in an extremely competitive space.”
Leonidas adds: “The proposition is very straightforward but extremely effective. We are all consumers and understand the power of social proof and how popularity and scarcity can affect our buying decisions. Our clients can see very quickly using A/B testing methodology that they have increased conversions and revenue once they have deployed Taggstar.”
