Accel joins e-commerce group backers

US-based venture capital firm Accel Partners has teamed up with Salesforce Ventures – Salesforce.com’s corporate investment group – and London venture capital firm Balderton Capital to make a $26 million Series B investment in Qubit, an ecommerce technology company.

Qubit provides ecommerce businesses with an integrated personalization platform, allowing them to personalise their websites for specific customers, for example first-timers and regular visitors. Founded in 2010 by four former Google employees, Qubit is based in London and counts high street giants Topshop, Uniqlo, John Lewis, Jimmy Choo and Staples among its users.

Qubit, which also has offices in New York and Paris, is intending to use the Series B investment to “fuel rapid expansion” of its presence in the US and “accelerate its ongoing programme of product innovation”.

Bruce Golden from Accel Partners will be joining Qubit’s board, on which Balderton’s Bernard Liautaud, founder of Business Objects, already sits. Balderton, whose past investments include Lovefilm and Betfair, led a $7.5 million Series A fundraise in Qubit in December 2012. Qubit has raised $36.5 million in total to date.

According to a statement, Qubit achieved 260 percent year-on-year growth in sales in the six months to June 2014, driven by an increasing recognition that website personalisation and optimisation are vital for growth. Qubit’s platform collects data on users’ interactions with a website, which it then analyses to identify patterns of behaviour. This information can be used to help drive revenue.

Qubit says it processes more than 1.5 billion online customer ‘events’ each day.

“This product offering and the data that underpins it has seen us become a leader in the mature UK market and a challenger with a big punch in the US,” Graham Cooke, Qubit’s CEO and co-founder, said in a statement. “Clients are increasingly turning to our integrated technology after years of frustration with the market’s single-point solutions. They are finding that our suite of products can optimise their online experiences and help their data to drive rapid and sustained ROI.”

Previous Accel investments include digital storage service Dropbox, social media platform Facebook, discount voucher site Groupon, price comparison site Kayak, music streaming site Spotify, and short-term lender Wonga.