- Czech e-commerce startup Outfindo raises €900K seed funding to boost the online shopping experience by matching customers with the right products, using an AI-powered guide.
- The round was led by Czech VC Presto Ventures with the participation of Patero and Longevity Fellows.
- With the new funding, Outfindo plans to expand its R&D, focusing on product-tuning and expanding into new verticals, and go-to-market activities.
“Over the years, I’ve often found myself helping friends and colleagues choose the perfect bike. On the other hand, I’ve been struggling with choosing any other more complex product myself. I realized that e-commerce has been so busy with growth and operations that customer experience has been left behind,” says Jan Mateju, the co-founder and CEO at Outfindo.
Jan Mateju continues, “After developing a guided-shopping companion for our own marketplace platform, we decided to offer the product as a SaaS tool to enable customer-centric discovery conversations for as many customers as possible.”
The challenge of choosing a complex product online
In recent years, e-commerce has shifted towards providing more advanced online customer experiences. However, this requires extensive product knowledge and innovative customer engagement.
Selecting a complex product may represent a frustrating and time-consuming task. Customers often feel overwhelmed and need to invest considerable effort to become nearly experts in the field without the guarantee of finding the desired product in stock. At the same time, merchants and producers of such products lack an effective, customer-friendly way of presenting their offerings, potentially making customers get lost or become frustrated and abandon their search.
Outfindo’s AI-driven guided selling approach: Personalized recommendations
Outfindo provides a customer-product matching experience through a guided selling approach powered by AI. Initially focusing on bikes and e-bikes, the startup has now expanded its services to washing machines in collaboration with major e-commerce platforms.
By engaging customers in a conversation and asking simple questions, Outfindo’s AI-driven discovery and sales tool assists in selecting products that meet their needs and narrowing down the options. The solution reaches a 40% interaction rate with the guide among visitors, boosts partner website conversions by up to 3 times, and reduces returns by up to 70%.
Founded in 2020 and focusing on its guided selling SaaS solution since 2023, Outfindo gained 30 e-commerce partners.
“Nowadays, we come across a lot of companies trying to augment their business with AI, even though often it is not necessary. But Outfindo is at the right place at the right time, in an industry that is in need of such a solution. Their outstanding value proposition is proven by a quick sales process and high customer close rates,” says Roman Novacek, a Partner at Presto Ventures.
“Recent developments have been exciting. We’ve leveraged the latest AI language models, which significantly increased our go-to-market efficiency and launch of a new product vertical,” adds Jan Mateju.
