Nosto

Nosto operates a Commerce Experience Platform (CXP) that combines personalization, on-site search, category merchandising and content experiences for ecommerce brands and retailers. The platform is built around a proprietary engine the company markets as experience.AI™, which unifies customer, product and content data in a single real-time engine so that signals captured in one part of the shopping experience can be actioned elsewhere. Core product modules include Predictive Product Recommendations, Personalized Search, Category Merchandising, Post-Purchase Upsell, Dynamic Bundles and Personalized Emails within a Product Experience Cloud, plus a Content Experience Cloud covering content personalization, pop-ups, user-generated content curation and site-wide A/B testing.

The company describes four AI approaches in the platform: predictive AI for behavioral modelling, semantic AI for interpreting query intent, visual AI for image tagging and visual similarity, and generative AI through integrations with third-party technologies such as OpenAI's ChatGPT. Nosto states that it holds patents on its proprietary AI and algorithms. Its most recent product direction is agentic commerce: an AI agent named Huginn that surfaces revenue opportunities, answers questions and augments search, merchandising, personalization and A/B testing.

Nosto distributes through integrations with commerce platforms and technologies, maintaining open-source plugins and libraries for Magento/Magento 2, Shopware 6, PrestaShop, React and Shopify Hydrogen among other repositories on GitHub. The company reports serving 1,500+ global brands and cites usage metrics of more than 1.1 billion daily product recommendations served and over 13 trillion recorded shopper signals.

Founding story

The company was founded in 2013 by Jani Luostarinen, Antti Pöyhönen and Juha Valvanne, who were dissatisfied with impersonal online shopping experiences and set out to translate the personal touches of in-person retail to ecommerce. The name comes from the Finnish word 'nosto', meaning to uplift or raise. The founders remain involved in the business; Valvanne serves as Founder and Chief Corporate Development Officer.

Business model

Nosto sells a SaaS commerce experience platform to online brands and retailers, complemented by professional services and turnkey implementation offerings. Pricing is described as a flexible model tailored to each brand, typically depending on site traffic, feature usage and business requirements, with customers able to start on core features and add modules as they scale.

Subscription-style software licensing for platform modules, with pricing scaled to traffic and feature usage, plus professional services; the company said in 2023 that it was profitable.

Traction

Nosto reports 1,500+ global brands using the platform, more than 1.1 billion daily product recommendations served and over 13 trillion recorded shopper signals. In its 2023 funding announcement the company said its technology had been used by over 2,500 global commerce brands, and that North American merchants using Nosto grew gross merchandise volume 300% from $1.7 billion in 2018 to $6.8 billion in 2022 (44% CAGR), with Shopify-based merchants growing 420% from $1.1 billion to $6 billion (51% CAGR). Customer results cited include AI personalization generating 9% of Marc Jacobs' online revenue.

Latest developments

Nosto has launched agentic personalization features powered by Huginn, an AI agent positioned to operate continuously across search, merchandising, personalization and A/B testing and to connect to third-party tools.