PingPong UX
PingPong, a UK-based UX design startup offering a fully integrated platform for UX research and user testing – with over 200 clients and 175,000+ testers across 100+ countries – has successfully concluded its M&A transaction with Contentsquare / Hotjar group, the global leader in digital experience intelligence and analytics - advised by Absolvo.
Overview
Our client, PingPong, a UK-based UX design startup offering a fully integrated platform for UX research and user testing – with over 200 clients and 175,000+ testers across 100+ countries – has successfully concluded its M&A transaction with Contentsquare / Hotjar group, the global leader in digital experience intelligence and analytics.
As part of the acquisition, the PingPong team and platform are joining forces with Hotjar, a Malta- and US-based user behaviour analytics company within the Contentsquare portfolio. This integration marked the launch of Hotjar Engage, the new branding for the combined solution.
A Six-Year Journey: From PingPong to Hotjar Engage
Founded in 2016, PingPong set out with a clear mission: to simplify and modernize the user research process. The team aimed to disrupt the traditional, slow, and fragmented approach to user testing, believing there had to be a more intuitive, efficient, and user-friendly way to gather feedback.
Starting with a modest, bootstrapped prototype and a network of friends and family as their first testers, the team built PingPong into a robust and respected user-testing platform. It served a global community of over 175,000 testers and a portfolio of high-profile clients.
In 2023, Hotjar (a platform trusted by over 1.1 million websites in 180+ countries) began using PingPong for its own user research. As conversations between the two teams deepened, they discovered a shared vision and philosophy.
Hotjar is committed to enabling every business to craft product experiences their users love. Achieving that required a deep understanding of user behaviour, which was something PingPong excelled at, by making face-to-face user feedback as accessible and effortless as possible.
As in many cases, when a strategic buyer wants to understand synergies, in this process, it was not only discussion of M&A teams. There were essential meetings between the product teams, sales and marketing discussions, or HR planning (future roles of key PingPong team members etc). Both teams wanted to understand and outline common goals, visions, and further product plans – which required time of course.
Through this acquisition, PingPong became rebranded as Hotjar Engage and fully integrated into the Hotjar product suite,
complementing existing offerings such as Ask (Surveys and Feedback) and Observe (Heatmaps and Recordings). While the brand name was changing, the product features that customers rely on will remain the same.
Contentsquare’s rapid growth path
Contentsquare, headquartered in Paris, has grown from a solo startup in a small attic to a global team of over 1,500 employees. The company has raised a total of USD 1.4 billion in funding – including a USD 600 million Series F round in 2023 – and has been actively expanding through strategic acquisitions.
Since 2019, Contentsquare has acquired Clicktale, Pricing Assistant, Adapt My Web, Dareboost, Upstride, and most notably, Hotjar in 2021. This robust growth strategy is aimed at providing comprehensive, cutting-edge insights for businesses of all sizes and industries.
The acquisition of PingPong opened the door to significant new opportunities. Being part of the Contentsquare / Hotjar family, PingPong (under its new name, Hotjar Engage) gained access to expanded resources, enhanced product development capabilities, a broader feature set, and an even larger global tester community.
"M&A is a quite specialized field where gaining practical and up-to-date knowledge is very challenging (…) Having managed many of these and seen various cases helps them understand how to approach, negotiate, and handle different situations to maximize outcomes. Absolvo takes clients' transactions to heart and manages them very professionally."
added Zsolt Korcsmárszky.
Source:
We are proud that PingPong UX was advised by Absolvo Consulting throughout the entire transaction process.
