Norwest Venture Partners Leads Series D Funding Round That Will Fuel Global Expansion and Future of Mobile Engagement
Leanplum, one of the leaders in mobile engagement, announced a $47 million Series D round of financing led by Norwest Venture Partners with participation from existing investors Canaan Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Shasta Ventures. Scott Beechuk, partner at Norwest and former SVP of product management at Salesforce Service Cloud, which he led to $2.3 billion in annual revenue, will join the Leanplum board of directors.
Leanplum is building the marketing cloud of the future, leveraging the unique power of mobile to help brands drive deep and meaningful customer relationships. This investment will accelerate product innovation in key areas such as machine learning, cross-channel automation, and one-to-one personalization. In addition, it will fuel international expansion to meet growing demand from marketers around the world.
“Mobile has changed the face of marketing, and the industry is undergoing a major transformation. Legacy marketing clouds are built for web and lack the real-time infrastructure to respond to customer needs across channels and devices. Leanplum is designed from the ground-up to deliver this value. One of their secret weapons is a world-class A/B testing solution that’s fundamental to their platform, allowing customers to optimize campaigns and generate higher ROI than competing solutions. Not only has Leanplum become the fastest growing mobile engagement platform, tripling revenue year over year for the past three years, but they’ve built an amazing work culture and are poised for continued growth in 2018,” said Scott Beechuk, partner at Norwest Venture Partners.
Capturing more than 16 billion mobile data points daily across its end-to-end platform, Leanplum provides the real-time insights and capabilities to help marketers deliver in-the-moment engagement across each user’s journey — at volume. This personalization at scale is the holy grail of marketing, which is why clients such as Tinder, Grab, Red Bull, Topshop, and Zynga are turning to Leanplum to harness the one-to-one value that only mobile can deliver.
Leanplum has made several strategic hires to fuel global demand. Jim Lightsey joined Leanplum as its first Chief Financial Officer, with a focus on scaling the company’s global finance, human resources, business operations, and legal capabilities. Other key hires include Oliver Stein and Julio Bermúdez, both formerly of Optimizely. Stein leads European sales operations and is based in Amsterdam, while Bermúdez leads Asia Pacific operations out of Singapore.
“Marketing is relationship-driven by nature, but over time, digital has optimized for reach versus meaningful connections. We’re excited to partner with Norwest because they share our long-term vision and realize that Leanplum is uniquely positioned to help marketers deliver in-the-moment engagement across every user’s journey. Leanplum is building an engagement platform that will transform the industry and take us to true relationship marketing, and in early December, we’ll unveil the next chapter in this journey,” said Momchil Kyurkchiev, Leanplum CEO and co-founder.
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