Made With Intent bags £1.5m seed funding to help online retailers align how they sell with actual buying behaviours

Made With Intent, a UK startup that has developed a platform helping online retailers to understand and target customer intent, has raised £1.5 million.

Led by Mercuri, with Portfolio Ventures and previous investors Haatch following, the seed funding will support the fully remote team of 15 with their product, marketing and partnership efforts.

Made With Intent has raised £2.1 million in total to date.

The idea came after the founder, David Mannheim, recognised a fundamental flaw in online retail strategies. After 15 years of optimising conversion rates in e-commerce, he realised the industry’s fixation on conversion metrics was the very thing holding it back.

“The current measures of success are the problem. Metrics like conversion rate, and therefore the actions retailers take to improve them, are short-term, retrospective and aggregated,” he says.

“This creates a race to the bottom. A numbers game that forgets how people really buy.”

Made With Intent looks to change this by giving retailers two things - a more human, segmented perspective of their website performance and a predictive targeting mechanism that lets other marketing tech respond to customer needs in real-time.

The company claims this approach creates a 9.4% average revenue uplift compared to generic optimisation.

“E-commerce is often guilty of trying to convert all customers at all times,” says Mannheim. “It focuses on the minority who are ready to buy, at the expense of those who are not. Our product helps retailers be appropriate for every customer. To progress both in-market and future buyers.”

A beta launched in September has helped customers like Ernest Jones, Bensons for Beds and Rapha align how they sell with actual buying behaviours.

Nik Fletcher, Head of Digital Experience at Rapha, describes the product as “the closest we can get to understanding subconscious visitor signals, like we can in a physical store.”

The platform works by collecting data through a script, modelling 250+ signals from online shoppers and returning predictive intent metrics in real-time. Visitors are then automatically segmented based on their journey, momentum and how likely they are to buy, exit or return in the future.

This data and the targeting of segments are handled in platform, but the tool is designed to be complementary.

With integrations to 40+ marketing tools, from ad networks to experience tools and CRMs, e-commerce teams can use Made With Intent to deliver more appropriate shopping experiences or reengagement tactics with the tools they already use.

“Made With Intent has embraced first principle thinking and a decade of insights to shake up the vast e-commerce market,” comments Alan Hudson, Founding General Partner at Mercuri.

“It empowers online commerce, making it more personal and focused on the quality of prospective customers. The product roadmap excites us and, importantly, those using it.”

“As a VC investor we look at a vast number of potential investments each year, however we only invest in less than a dozen. Made With Intent's strategy is similar for its customers - to focus on the quality of the prospect, not the number of prospects."

With an existing user base in the UK, Denmark, Germany and the USA, the company is aiming to reach 100 global customers within two years.

Mannheim says: "Made With Intent is about more than a platform. It's about a movement to create a more personal, human e-commerce. This investment brings us closer to fulfilling our mission."