Hoping for an 80% increase in user engagement?
We are thrilled to announce that Storm has invested in LiftIgniter, the personalization API for every digital touchpoint. The solution uses machine learning to create personalized, digital experiences to increase user engagement (lift) by an average of 80%.
With all of our devices, phones, and apps like Facebook always pulling at our attention, things have changed. It’s the dawn of a new age: in the epic, age-old battle between mankind and goldfish, goldfish have taken the upper fin (I mean “hand”). The goldfish attention span now outlasts the human attention span by one second. Check the scoreboard, folks. Goldfish: 9 seconds, Humans: 8 seconds.
Given this threat of goldfish ascension, the battle to keep humans engaged and alert is fierce. Facebook has set the bar high. Users expect to be served the most captivating content, whether it be the latest SNL video, the weirdest viral cat meme, or the latest business breakthrough, all in real time. We are addicted to relevance, personalization, and stimulation and the numbers show it.
The pressure for personalized content is on for every digital experience. It’s no longer an option or a neat trick. You must be as engaging as YouTube, Instagram, Netflix, or Facebook, or ELSE…
While personalization is a priority, companies find it difficult to achieve — let alone achieve it in real-time. Most businesses can’t afford, or are unable, to hire a team of insanely talented machine learning (ML) experts to build and design a dedicated personalization engine.
This is a big problem when enterprises are spending millions of dollars a year to get new eyes on their digital properties. Not personalizing the experience is shooting yourself in the foot and is guaranteed to alienate you from digitally native audiences.
Enter LiftIgniter. Who needs to build an ML team when you can just drop a line of JavaScript into your webpage’s template? The LiftIgniter API integration is ridiculously simple, and in a few days the algorithm is fine-tuned and starts lifting your visitors’ engagement. The solution learns and reacts to each impression in real-time to predict and serve-up tailored content for every action your visitor takes. In other words, the way they scroll, mouseover, and click on content impacts the next piece of content they will be served. The user experience keeps improving — the longer they stay, the more they click, and generate income for your business. Voila!
Language and content agnostic, the algorithm can serve any media — video, image or text — in any language. Customer like NTT DOCOMO (the leading Japanese mobile carrier) saw tremendous increases in user engagement while no one on Liftigniter’s team speaks Japanese.
“It is like magic” — was the line we heard in most customer calls. “We are not sure why the specific content pushed by the algorithm works, but it does, and the conversion rate increases.” mentioned more customers.
As VCs, we tend to be skeptical when we hear the terms AI, Machine Learning, or Deep Learning in a business description or pitch. The reason is simple, the number of teams out there that have the right skills aimed at attacking the right problems where ML can truly be transformational are limited. So when LiftIgniter first walked through our doors, you could say that we were a bit skeptical…
But with a CEO like Indraneel Mukherjee, who holds a PhD in Machine Learning from Princeton and who was optimizing YouTube’s already-optimized recommendation engine while at Google, the skepticism turned quickly into rock solid conviction.
Indraneel co-founded Liftigniter with Adam Spector who previously ran a social data science company, and did business development at Clearwell Systems, an e-discovery company that sold to Symantec for $400 million.
We are looking forward to collaborating with a powerful team that has already caught impressive traction and we believe will continue to attract customers looking to provide hyper relevance to their visitors.
Welcome LiftIgniter!
