Zycada Bots Aim To Speed Up E-Commerce Transactions

Shopping cart abandonment is defined as a situation where a person shopping online moves away from a site or mobile app before completing a sale. This practice is one of the biggest hurdles to e-commerce, with some 70 percent of all visits with an intention to buy never resulting in actual transactions.

Now, a startup called Zycada is emerging from stealth to help address that, with bot-based technology that speeds up how quickly the interactive elements load up on e-commerce sites. In turn, online retailers - which number somewhere between 12 million and 24 million sites globally - can have sites that work as well or even faster than Amazon, the quintessential bull in the e-commerce shop.

In addition to coming out of stealth, it's announcing US$ 19 million in funding and a new CEO, James Brear, to grow the business.

The round is being led by Kholsa Ventures, with Cervin Venturers and Nordic Eye Venture Capital also participating. Prior to today, according to PitchBook data, it looks like the company had raised just under US$ 11 million in early stage funding, and it's not disclosing its valuation.

But as is the case with a lot of B2B companies, Zycada has not been sitting idle while in stealth: the company has already picked up a number of very large customers, including one of the world's very biggest retailers (which wishes to keep its name out of this story). These businesses are using the technology to speed up their sites, and specifically the interactive elements on their pages such as "buy" buttons. Those large customers are likely one reason it's raised so much money while still in stealth.

The issue that Zycada is tackling is one particular niche of web content delivery called Time to Interactive (TTI).

The idea is that a typical webpage involves a complicated mix of activities and purposes being handled and loaded by content delivery networks, and each of those don't necessarily work in concert with the others.

They range from images, advertisements and interactive buttons through to cookies, analytics and many things that a consumer doesn't "see" but are used by the company to improve what they are providing and to amass data for future activities.

Obviously, in an ideal world all of this would be coming online in the blink of an eye, but realistically what is more often the case is that some of the most critical elements find themselves "queuing" behind others to appear and work for a typical user.

And it turns out that typical users have very little patience online. "Buy Now" really does mean "now". So when something critical like interactive buttons don't appear or don't work for a moment or more, shoppers move on and the site loses a sale.

The worry is that losing a sale really is losing: Zycada estimates that e-commerce sales will be worth some US$ 7 trillion by 2024, from US$ 3.5 trillion in 2018. But with world events like global health pandemics pushing people to shop virtually, if one site doesn't work well, a shopper will simply navigate to another that works better.