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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowProdport, a marketing-tech startup whose leadership includes the former CEO of Emarsys, has landed $3.6 million in seed funding to help it grow and hire more employees.
Prodport’s CEO and co-founder is Ohad Hecht of Carmel, who previously led the marketing-tech firm Emarsys from 2014 until he stepped down in October. Based in Vienna, Austria, Emarsys has more than 750 global employees, with its North American headquarters and its CEO in Indianapolis.
After leaving Emarsys, Hecht joined Prodport as its fourth co-founder, along with Ben Strumpf, who lives in the Washington, D.C., area; Mauritz Dressler of Germany; and Vinod Singh of India. Strumpf, Dressler and Singh launched Prodport in stealth mode in the spring of 2021, and the company launched publicly last month.
Hecht said he sees a lot of potential ahead for Prodport, whose technology allows online retailers to customize their product pages and increase the likelihood of making a sale.
“We are riding the e-commerce wave, which is huge,” Hecht said.
Prodport uses customer data such as demographics, location and other information to personalize product pages for the individual customer who’s looking at that page. As an example: One person shopping for a cell phone online might be most interested in the phone’s battery life while another person might be most interested using the phone for gaming. If the two shoppers end up on a product page for the same phone, Prodport technology could customize the product descriptions, images and highlighted features that each shopper sees, tailored to his or her interests.
Having a relevant and appealing product page is key, Hecht said, because that page is the point at which customers often decide whether to make a purchase. “That’s the moment of truth. It’s buy or bounce.”
Prodport’s $3.6 million in seed funding came from several individual investors in the U.S. and Europe. Hecht was one of the lead investors, along with Matt Blodgett of San Francisco investment firm Praxis and Armin Dressler of Switzerland-based Exuberance Capital. Other investors in the round include Steve Wietrecki, the former chief revenue officer at Boston-based marketing tech firm Klaviyo; and Alexander Thamm of Germany, the CEO and founder of data science consulting firm Alexander Thamm GmbH.
In connection with their investments, Blodgett, Wietrecki and Armin Dressler have joined Prodport’s board of directors, with Dressler serving as board chairman. Thamm is serving as a company advisor.
The company has about 18 employees, Hecht said. That number is made up of the four founders, plus a group of contract employees based in India.
And the company is looking ahead to growth. It will have its European product launch event in Munich, Germany, next week, and it’s currently hiring. Prodport’s website includes listings for four open positions, two in the U.S. and two in Germany.
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