Tinkering with banner adverts for his family’s vegetable import-export business led Jonathan Cherki to found Contentsquare. The Paris-based startup that helps optimize apps and websites is now valued at $2.8 billion after raising $500 million in a round led by the SoftBank Vision Fund. 

Contentsquare chief executive and founder Cherki said that the round will help the business to continue to expand internationally, and triple the size of its research and development team to 600, and pursue new acquisitions. The company sells digital tools to help brands like Disney, Gucci, and Adobe to analyze how customers use and interact with websites and apps. 

“In a physical store you see who is buying, who is leaving, but online you are blind” says Cherki. “To answer this question we collected user information like mouse movements, touches and swipes and transformed those into actionable recommendations.”

Cherki founded the business in 2012 and Contentsquare has now grown to over 800 employees worldwide. Contentsquare last raised $190 million in a Series D round in May 2020 and since then has acquired four companies, including accessibility experts Adapt My Web, and website monitoring tool DareBoost. 

The $500 million round was led by the SoftBank Vision Fund 2, along with existing investors Eurazeo, KKR, Canaan and Highland Europe. “I think more and more companies across the world will decide to engage digitally with their clients and to build that consumer experience having the insights that Contentsquare provides will be imperative for them” says Yanni Pipilis, managing partner at the SoftBank Vision Fund.

Investments from SoftBank’s Vision Fund helped the Japanese conglomerate return a record $42.5 billion profit earlier this month marking a dramatic turnaround after billionaire founder Masayoshi Son rued the “valley of coronavirus” that plunged the tech investment fund into an unprecedented $18 billion loss last year.