For more than a decade, Hypepotamus has tracked and chronicled the story of dozens of companies that have evolved from promising local startups into formidable, established ventures. One such company with true sticking power over that time has been Fullstory.
The B2B SaaS company, founded by ex-Googlers, started out with a $1.5 million seed round in 2014 and is now backed by large investment firms like Kleiner Perkins, Salesforce Ventures, Permira, Stripes, and Glynn Capital Management. Its technology tracks behavioral data to help customers detect imperfect user experiences on a website and ultimately make better decisions to improve their digital presence.
Now, scaling a tech company to about 400 employees (and growing) plus a roster of well-known logos as clients, as Fullstory has, is no small feat. But today’s tech environment requires such companies to navigate new challenges, particularly around how to best build or work with artificial intelligence.
It’s a challenge that Fullstory has embraced, says founder and CEO Scott Voigt.
Fullstory In The AI Age
“When we founded Fullstory a little over a decade ago, the thesis of the founding team really was that behavioral data was the unlock to giving good digital experiences,” Voigt told Hypepotamus. For the first ten years, that process was very “human led,” he added, meaning that teams had to know exactly what problem they wanted Fullstory’s platform to solve.
But as AI has evolved, so too has Fullstory’s technology and capabilities. This April the company introduced StoryAI, an AI agent system that predicts customer behavior, personalizes digital interactions, and ultimately gives product, engineering, data, and IT teams the ability to better act on their data.
That has resonated with enterprise clients, Fullstory’s fastest-growing customer segment. Well over half of its revenue comes from enterprise clients, a big jump from just a few years ago.
But Fullstory also realized a new opportunitity with their expanded AI insights. And that comes from helping companies take a look inside their own operations.
Fullstory Workforce, which also launched this year, identifies those “swivel chair moments” where employees are constantly switching between different tabs and different software programs, Voigt explained. Companies can use Workforce to get a clearer picture about how employees use (or don’t use) workplace tools in order to improve workflows or even reduce spend on unused licenses.
New Names At Fullstory
It’s not just new technology that Fullstory has unveiled recently. The team made several c-suite level changes over the last year, with Jason Wolf, previously at Ping Identity and SAP, would step up as President and Claire Fang, ex-Facebook, Microsoft, McKinsey, and Qualtrics, would take over the CTO position.
This spring, the MarTech giant tapped a well-known name in the city’s technology community, Chad Gold, to be its top financial officer.
Kyle Porter, CEO of Salesloft, introduced Gold and Voigt. The two stayed connected for years before Gold officially joined the Fullstory team.
This is Gold’s third time sitting in the CFO seat for an Atlanta-based tech company. Gold, who attended Emory University’s Goizueta Business School for his MBA, worked at EY, The Home Depot, and SAP before joining Atlanta’s waste management software company Rubicon as the company’s CFO in 2017. He went on to serve as CFO of Salesloft shortly after the MarTech company raised its Series C funding round.
Voigt told Hypepotamus that Gold is a “true operating partner” sitting in the CFO seat.
When assessing new opportunities, Gold says he considers the “Four T’s”: Team, technology, TAM, and the trajectory of the business. He found all four of those things right in his own backyard with Fullstory.
Within Fullstory, Gold said he is focused on growing the enterprise part of the business and helping the team “prioritize where [they’re] investing resources.”
Longer term, he says he views his CFO role as one that “keeps Fullstory at the center of the AI conversation” based on the company’s product and commercial investment strategies.