SEO Startup Botify Raises $55 Million for APAC Expansion
- French SEO startup Botify has raised $55 million in Series C funding.
- The startup aims to make websites rank higher on Google and other search engines.
- The Paris-based firm counts Expedia, The New York Times, and GitHub among its clients.
- See more stories on Insider’s business page.
Botify, a startup that helps make websites more visible for search engines, has raised $55 million in fresh funding.
The Paris-based company aims to dramatically improve search engine optimization (SEO) for large companies with the likes of Expedia, GitHub, and the New York Times among its clients. Botify argues that as much as 50% of large businesses’ sites are not indexed by search engines like Google.
Indexing is the practice whereby search engines collect, rank, and offer links to users. The French startup claims its analytics and AI platform can ensure more blog posts, articles, and other web pages are scanned by search engines and ranked accordingly. For businesses, this means a higher clickthrough rate and increased revenue.
With 80,000 searches done per second globally, it’s unsurprising that SEO is a major market. Botify wants to move beyond keyword optimization towards a model where websites are actively organized in a way which benefits the growing world of organic search. In organic search, results are determined purely on the search query rather than being influenced by advertiser payments.
“Organic search is a massive market, we are all searching all the time from many devices,” Adrien Menard, Botify cofounder and CEO told Insider.
Menard said the company was already “growing a lot” but that the pandemic had a major impact on the business, which was founded in 2012.
“It accelerated the business, for two main reasons,” he said. “There was a digital transformation bringing more companies online, which meant they cannot ignore organic search marketing and similarly marketing teams were being asked to do more with less, so needed a solution.”
E-commerce boomed during the pandemic as retail moved online with volumes jumping to $26.7 trillion globally, per UNCTAD. The result for Botify is that e-commerce makes up some 45% of the startup’s revenue and has prompted pushes into new adjacent verticals like automotives, tech, banking, and luxury items, Menard said.
And alongside existing offices in North America and Europe the company will push into APAC with offices in Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo amid a hiring effort that will up headcount from 200 currently to around 500.
The Series C funding comes from French infrastructure investor InfraVia Growth, with participation from Bpifrance as well as existing investors Eurazeo and Ventech.
Botify has now raised $82.2 million to-date with Menard stating that the process took three months from start to finish.
Check out Botify’s pitch deck below: