Zycada today emerged from stealth to enable the “fastest online shopping experience in the world.” The company says their new approach improves Time to Interact (TTI) speeds 10X greater than Amazon, resulting in dramatic gains in online retail revenues and empowering merchants to achieve faster online shopping experiences than Amazon for the first time.

As part of the launch, Zycada announced it raised $19 million in total funding to date, with Kholsa Ventures leading the investment and Cervin Venturers and Nordic Eye Venture Capital participating. The funding will accelerate product development further and expand the go-to-market efforts. In addition, industry leader Preetish Nijhawan, Managing Partner at Cervin Ventures and co-Founder of Akamai Technologies, has joined Zycada’s Board of Directors. Zycada also has appointed James Brear as President & CEO. Before joining Zycada as CEO, Brear was President & CEO of Veriflow, which was sold to VMWare in August 2019.

The e-commerce market will expand rapidly in the coming years, especially as public health concerns radically reshape consumer behavior and further accelerate the transition from brick and mortar stores to online shopping. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, online sales were forecast to grow from $3.5 trillion in 2018 to $7 trillion in 2024.

Today, there are 12-24 million online retailers globally, with many of these online retailers lacking the infrastructure and resources to deliver e-commerce sessions that are as quick and reliable as Amazon’s. Even large e-retailers struggle to match Amazon’s speed and market dominance. TTI is a critical metric for gauging e-commerce performance, measuring how long it takes for the interactive elements of a page (such as a “buy now” button) to load.

Zycada says their TTI is below 500 milliseconds, significantly outpacing Amazon. By leveraging Zycada’s innovative new approach, online retailers gain substantial improvements in conversion rate, revenue per session and total revenue uplift. The company further explained their solution is simple to use and works right out the box, enabling organizations or quickly transform their online shopping portals.

“The e-commerce market has been growing exponentially for decades. The current pandemic will permanently alter consumer behavior in a way that will only hasten that growth. However, for the vast majority of e-retailers to capture more of this burgeoning market, they need to overcome massive speed and performance limitations,” said James Brear, CEO, Zycada. “Zycada has introduced an innovative approach that eliminates these bottlenecks by employing the scale and power of bot technology in a way that’s never been done. As a result, we’re not just leveling the playing field between e-retailers and Amazon – we’re helping them rise above Amazon.”

About Zycada’s Technology

Zycada uses programmable performance bot technology which can uniquely fingerprint online merchant eCommerce sites and intelligently accelerate both static and dynamic content. Zycada bots anticipate user interactions, working ahead of them as a personal concierge to dramatically enhance the shopper’s experience.  This enables online retailers to deliver a rich, responsive shopping experience out of the box, with no configuration or tuning to their eCommerce site. For advanced online shopping applications, Zycada bots are micro-programmable, allowing merchants to uniquely customize the shopper’s experience to meet their specific needs. Zycada seamlessly integrates with existing CDN’s, and requires no code changes. Delivered as a SaaS, Zycada can be installed and running in less than a few hours.  

This reminds us of how Facebook preloads pages on mobile devices – called prefetching. Certainly, many studies have shown that sites that load faster, do better. This leads us to believe there is a rapid ROI argument to be made when deciding to purchase Zycada’s solutions.

“Modern consumers and mobile app users are sophisticated and demand experiences that are responsive, regardless of the content,” said Preetish Nijhawan, Managing Partner at Cervin Ventures and co-Founder of Akamai Technologies. “Zycada is changing the game, and creating a new standard for high-performance delivery of rich, dynamic experiences.”

“With multiple Fortune 500 customers already on our customer list, Zycada has real market momentum before they’ve even exited stealth. The team is solving a critical business problem for a target market that is being fueled by big macro trends,” said John Hamm, Operating Partner at Khosla Ventures. “The appointment of James Brear as CEO is major milestone for the company and this signals continued rapid growth. James has experience driving several high-growth startups to successful acquisitions. He’s the perfect CEO to lead Zycada during this critical next phase of growth.”

Zycada was founded in 2016 by Subbu Varadarajan and Roy Antonyraj. Their combined experience at Akamai, Shape Security, and Symantec provided the foundation for a new vision – to leverage the power, scale and performance of bot technology to enhance the user experience. Varadarajan now serves as the CPO and Antonyraj is the company’s CTO.

The company raised a $2,000,000 seed round from Cervin Ventures in 2016 and a Series A from Khosla Ventures in 2017.

Our take is companies face numerous disadvantages when competing with Amazon, if they can actually leapfrog the online retailer in any important area, it is a smart investment.

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