The Braze Human Approach to Customer Engagement Continues to Disrupt Legacy Cloud Players
Braze (formerly Appboy), the leading global customer engagement platform that delivers personalized messaging experiences across push, email, apps, and more, announced an $80 million Series E round of funding led by Meritech Capital Partners, a venture capital company with investments in leading technology brands such as Facebook, MuleSoft, and Salesforce. This latest infusion of capital brings Braze to $130 million raised in just over a year and has more than doubled its valuation to $850 million from Series D in 2017.
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With data, technology, and teams working together in unison, the Braze platform makes marketing more authentic, brands more human, and customers more satisfied with every experience.
At the time of this announcement, Bill Magnuson, Cofounder and CEO at Braze, said, “Coupled with ever-increasing customer expectations, the relentless advance of technology is creating an immense challenge for brands to maintain and strengthen their customer relationships over time.”
Bill added, “We’ve built Braze to be the backbone of customer engagement, helping brands combine our sophisticated technology with a fundamentally human approach that helps turn that challenge into (an) opportunity.”
“Meritech invests in fast-growing sector leaders offering new technology to large markets—and that is exactly what we see in Braze,” said Paul Madera, Cofounder of Meritech Capital Partners.
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Paul added, “We rarely hear customers rave enthusiastically over technology, but that is exactly what we heard regarding Braze. Their customers are passionate about the differentiated solution to cloud-based marketing, and their remarkably effective platform surpasses a prior generation of tools that no longer work.”
Braze boasts over 500 digital-first and enterprise brand customers, including ABC News, AccuWeather, Delivery Hero, HBO, Lyft, Jet.com, KFC Australia, Microsoft, RedMart, The Skimm, and Venmo. Each month, Braze powers tens of billions of messages, delivered to over 1.5 billion monthly active users globally. In Q2 2018 alone, Braze processed 1 trillion engagement events, enabling brands to take immediate action on customer insights and create personalized, cross-channel messaging experiences.
“At RetailMeNot, we are constantly looking for innovative ways to build human connections with customers at scale,” said Marissa Tarleton, Chief Marketing Officer at RetailMeNot, Inc.
Marissa added, “To speak to human beings instead of targets or segments takes sophisticated technology in the hands of skilled, interdisciplinary teams. Our product, marketing, and engineering teams unanimously chose the Braze platform to help us solve this challenge.”
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Since the beginning of 2017, Braze more than tripled its annual recurring revenue, increased monthly email volume by 600%, and opened a Singapore office marking its official entry into the APAC market. In this round, the company also received backing from Spark Capital, a venture capital firm invested in Oculus, Postmates, and Slack, as well as backing from Cross Creek.
“In an industry where consumer demands are evolving at an unprecedented rate, Braze is a critical component of the customer experience we’re able to deliver at Overstock,” said JP Knab, Chief Marketing Officer at Overstock.
JP added, “Data agility and advanced intelligence made possible by Braze allow(s) us to further unlock the power of data and drive personalized, coherent conversations with our customers at the right time.”
Currently, Braze (formerly Appboy) is a customer engagement platform that delivers messaging experiences across push, email, apps, and more. Braze is built specifically for today’s mobile-first world and tomorrow’s ambient computing future. Braze is set apart as the platform that allows for real-time and continuous data streaming, replacing decades-old databases that aren’t built for today’s on-demand always-connected customer.
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