Better Experiences Start Here: Personal Thoughts On Our Series D Funding Round

author

Jonathan Cherki

May 19, 2020 | 3 min read

Last Updated: Jun 4, 2020


Three years ago I moved with my family to New York to grow Contentsquare in the US. And it really seemed like a challenge at the time — no one knew who we were outside of France and the UK, and my English was pretty atrocious. We built a small team, rented a co-working space, and got to work.

Things have always moved very swiftly in this company, but the last three years have been particularly fast even by our standards. Our team has gone from 1 to 150 people in the US and from 200 to 650 globally, we’ve turned 2 offices into 8, acquired two companies, and completed three rounds of fundraising.

On a personal level, I have not stopped learning. The truth is, I’m obsessed with learning new things and discovering what else is possible. This is what gave me the idea for Contentsquare in the first place: the notion that there was a world of hidden intelligence on digital behavior, and what it would take to make all that knowledge accessible. 

Everyone at Contentsquare has the same insatiable curiosity and obsession to go beyond themselves. That’s why we have 170 people in R&D focused solely on finding solutions today for tomorrow’s business challenges. That’s why we go straight to our 700+ clients to help define our roadmap (they know best!). That’s why every time we organize a Hackathon, our product house knows it’s going to spend the next few months bringing a bunch of exciting new ideas to life.

This latest funding round validates the hard work, commitment and values of our team. From the start of this adventure, we have spent as much energy building the culture of this company as we have on innovation. Why? Because innovation is driven by human curiosity, and collaboration fast-tracks it. I feel very lucky to be surrounded by the extraordinary people I work with and the company owes its growth to them.

I know I’m not the only one who sees this energy and ambition, and believes in the vision of our company and people. I’m thinking of our clients who trust us, and rely on our insights to transform their team and deliver great experiences. Our partners who leverage our technology and share our mission of democratizing data so everyone has the tools to make a difference. And our investors who have reaffirmed their faith in our project three times over in the past three years.

The new financing is only going to increase our capacity to set new standards for the future of experience, by unlocking a deeper understanding of what people want and don’t want from their digital interactions. It’s going to help us accelerate on innovation organically and through M&A, to help us expand in the markets we already work with, and to bring us to new regions of the world.

We have a very clear vision for the next five years, and we have the values we need to support its execution. Team spirit, uniqueness, enthusiasm, creativity, and ambition — these values haven’t changed and they’re still the key ingredient of our growth and innovation recipe.

I’m so proud of the work we have done, of how far we’ve all come, and of how much we’ve all learned — but it’s not enough. We have so much more to explore together, so much more we can do to help brands achieve digital maturity even faster, so much more we can contribute to our collective digital happiness.

Why do I still feel like we’re just getting started, eight years on? Because it’s true.

We have strong ambition, and I firmly believe that where there is a will, there is a way.