A company that helps brands like Microsoft and Lego with their digital “product discovery” experiences is now calling the Bay State its home.
A few months after bringing on a new CEO and less than a year from securing $169 million in new funding, Zoovu is centering its next stage of growth in Boston. The company announced today that it was moving its global headquarters to Boston and plans to continue building its local presence.
CEO James Novak, who joined the company in November 2022, said Zoovu was founded in Austria and still has an office in that country, as well as Poland, Germany and the United Kingdom. Zoovu began building out a Boston team after the investment from New York City-based FTV Capital last year.
“It’s actually the antithesis of what’s happening maybe in the Northeast, where tech companies are leaving. This is a tech company that’s coming to the Boston area,” Novak said.
Overcoming “decision paralysis” in online shopping
Zoovu aims to help customers avoid the “decision paralysis” they might encounter when online shopping by managing the product discovery experiences they have with brands, Novak said.
“We’re helping (companies) convert to like three to four times what they would in regular ecommerce workflow,” Novak said.
He said Zoovu’s product helps companies in three different ways. First, Zoovu’s AI-driven data platform helps understand a product search query. Novak said they use their relational database of terms aggregated from their customers to understand what a consumer means based on their online search. For example, he said, if a customer types into a search engine that they’re looking for a laptop that fits in a backpack, Zoovu knows they need a 15-inch laptop and can surface the most relevant product.
“Each new customer gets the benefit of the previous data that we get from the old customers. That’s of course anonymized and aggregated,” Novak said.
Zoovu also builds more customer-facing tools like smart chats and visual configurations to show available products and accessories. And the company collects customer engagement data and provides it to brands.
“This whole thing is being run by AI so that we get better over time. We learn from the questions, we learn answers, we learn profiles of our customers, all that great stuff,” Novak said.
Building in the “cool, kind of sexy place of the internet”
When Novak was looking for his next role after the acquisition of his startup Fiix Inc. in 2021, there were three things he wanted to see in a new venture. He wanted to work at a company with between 200-300 employees that was scaling. He was also looking for an “IPO-able opportunity,” something that could grow to a valuation over $1 billion over the next five to seven years. And he wanted to work on a “cool, kind of sexy place of the internet.”
Novak said he’d found this in Zoovu, which was working on “AI, cutting-edge technology, changing consumer behaviors, working with some of the biggest and smartest brands.”
The company is past its startup phase, Novak said, and in its scale-up phase.
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Novak said the company has about 50 employees at its office at 855 Boylston St. Most of the Boston employees work in go-to-market efforts while development teams largely live in Europe, he said. Zoovu has about 240 employees globally.
The chief executive declined to share hiring goals for the year ahead but said Boston will be the central hub of Zoovu and “most hiring” would be focused in the Boston area.
Novak said they chose Boston for its headquarters because of the strong tech talent pool, presence of large companies that are “aspirational” to Zoovu and its role as a hub for AI.
Plans for scaling
Operationally, the company plans to pursue more customers, marketing and investment. In today’s announcement, the company also shared the hiring of its first chief marketing officer, Ken Yanhs. He is the former senior vice president of marketing at IntelyCare, which was recently ranked number one on the Boston Business Journal’s Middle Market Leader List. This means it came on top of the 50 highest-growth companies with revenue between $25 million and $1 billion in Massachusetts.
The company has also hired David Dean as its first chief financial officer. Dean was previously the CFO of Fiix and worked closely with Novak.
The second area of focus for Zoovu is innovation. One issue they’re focusing on is integrating AI into their workflow, starting with ChatGPT. Novak said ChatGPT could be a helpful tool to build out product recommendations. Instead of just providing a product listing, ChatGPT could give an explanation as to why this product is the best fit for a customer.
“If you think about the retail experience in-store, a salesperson asks you all these questions, they understand what it is that you’re looking for, and then they take you to a laptop and say this is the one I chose for you because it’s got this much gigahertz and we know that works for gaming, etc.,” Novak said. “We actually can use ChatGPT to create that narrative when we choose a laptop for you.”
