- The Prague-based onboarding platform Product Fruits raises a seed funding of €1.6M to develop its high-growth Digital Adoption Platform (DAP), providing a no-code interface and easy integrations to create seamless onboarding processes.
- The seed round was co-led by VCs Leverage and Venture to Future Fund, who are joining a previous investor Lighthouse Ventures.
- The Product Fruits platform has already signed close to 500 customers, including Olympic Broadcasting Services, Sanofi, and IU International University.
By 2025, 70% of companies are expected to use Digital Onboarding Platforms (DAPs) to overcome user experience issues. This growth trend is driven by rising marketing costs, with customer acquisition costs (CACs) becoming unsustainable in many markets. Moreover, a 2022 HubSpot report found that the average CAC for marketing reached $1,250, a 25% increase from 2021, while technology and software firms had the highest CAC at $2,000. Despite these escalating costs, the efficiency of digital onboarding is still low.
Product Fruits’ seed investment will be used to develop the sales organization and processes and lay the foundations for a next-generation AI product.
Ladislav Šalom, the co-founder and CEO, tells The Recursive: “We are incredibly excited about our initiative to add an AI component to our onboarding platform. With the help of AI, we’ll be able to automate many aspects of the onboarding process, making it even easier and more intuitive for our customers. With the enhancements of AI and Machine Learning, Product Fruits will be able to make predictive analyses in real-time to see precisely where new software users encounter problems. This is a major step forward for us, and we’re looking forward to seeing the positive impact it will have on our customers’ businesses.”
Product Fruits’ enhanced user onboarding
Product Fruits empowers businesses with higher user retention, growth, and revenue by creating effortless onboarding processes. As a result, non-technical users, like product and content managers, can use this no-code layer to create prompts, step-by-step tours, and other interactive content that assists customers in navigating through the app and realizing the benefits of adoption.
Bringing his background in the gaming industry to Product Fruits, the co-founder and COO Karel Papík says: “Gaming industry takes onboarding or game tutorials very seriously. It’s an integral part of the design, and it’s always about more than learning the controls. Likewise, with business apps, I think there are better ways to get users onboarded that are intuitive, light, adaptive, and even gamified. The stakes are high – I would say 90% of free-trial users for business apps never convert, and we are making huge improvements here.”
“Business leaders are fed up with pumping money into marketing programs only to create leads that fail to convert into paying customers. The reason for Product Fruits’ early success is that we fix broken onboarding processes and deliver a clear and positive impact on revenue. Customers see results from day one – higher conversion from free trials, more upsell opportunities, better NPS, and reduced customer care tickets,” says the co-founder and CEO Ladislav Šalom.
The startup serves businesses from various sectors, including insurance, e-learning, games, marketing, and real estate, with a web-based application. The solution is simple to adopt through a Chrome browser extension for trial mode and code insertion for full functionality without needing further support from the IT team.
Matěj Boruta, a VC Leverage founding partner, adds, “The potential for growth is enormous – everything is turning into software, and all of this software needs onboarding in order to be effective and retain new users. This team truly understands how to make the onboarding experience stickier and more delightful.”
Operating since 2022, Product Fruits has grown its revenue by 30% per month. With nearly 500 customers worldwide, the startup is working on integrating AI into its technology to automatically identify opportunities for improving onboarding processes. Product Fruits aims to triple its ARR in the coming financial year, primarily due to its ease of use for non-technical marketing users.
