Emotive Raises $50M Series B; Accelerates Growth Of Conversational Text Message Platform
– Adds Murat Bicer, General Partner at CRV, to Board of Directors; Expands C-Suite with the Hiring of Adam Waid as Chief Customer Officer and Oleg Pylnev as Chief Technology Officer
– Explosive 466% year-over-year growth; Opens New Offices Boston and Atlanta with plans to triple workforce in 2021
Emotive, the first and only conversational text message platform for eCommerce brands, announced today that it has closed a Series B funding round of $50 million led by CRV, bringing the company’s valuation to $400 million. Other investors who participated in the round include existing investors Mucker Capital, TenOneTen Ventures, and new investors, Stripes and Vulcan Capital.
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Emotive is also announcing an expansion of its C-suite with key executive hires, the addition of Murat Bicer, general partner at CRV to its Board, and new offices in Boston and Atlanta.
“Our inboxes are under assault and the smartphone is increasingly our de facto Internet access device of choice,” says Murat Bicer, general partner at CRV. “It’s not uncommon to send dozens of texts to friends, family and loved ones throughout the day. In a competitive world chock full of choices, brands that want to authentically connect with customers have to evolve and go where discussions are happening and that’s not always in inboxes. Emotive is perfectly poised to become the best way for companies to quickly engage people, because Emotive fosters meaningful conversations where customers are having them.”
Emotive plans to use the capital to accelerate its go-to-market strategy, invest in its platform, and launch new products while cementing its position as the leader in human-to-human marketing. The investment comes just seven months after its Series A round in May of 2020, led by Mucker Capital.
Founded just over two years ago, Emotive is the first human-to-human marketing platform that uses conversational text messaging to help eCommerce brands exponentially grow revenue. Its platform uses a combination of AI automation and human assistance to scale texts that replicate human interaction. Ecommerce brands use Emotive’s text conversations to prevent cart abandonment, promote sales and new product releases, offer interactive text quizzes, and scale product recommendations. The text message platform converts an average of 8-10% compared to a standard one-way text message blast that converts roughly 1-2%, providing substantial revenue lift for merchants on Shopify, Magento, Bigcommerce, Woocommerce and others.
“We believe the rise of mobile commerce has made two-way conversations through text a new standard for businesses to interact with their customers,” Saagar Kulkarni, Partner, Stripes. “Emotive’s platform has made it possible for businesses of any size to leverage the power of human conversation, and we’re thrilled to partner with the Emotive team to help make their vision of human-to-human marketing a reality at scale.”
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“We launched Emotive and created the Human-to-Human Marketing category because we have a vision of a world where brands are able to scale human conversations with every individual customer to power revenue and loyalty. Other email and text message platforms still deliver a 1-to-many experience through the archaic newsletter blast. Consumers simply don’t like receiving impersonal newsletter blasts over their most intimate communication channels: text messaging. In reality, the only way to accomplish a true one-to-one relationship is by having an emotionally intelligent conversation with that individual, one that actually feels like there’s a real human being on the other end. We are excited to continue to accelerate our growth and bring increasingly intelligent and differentiated solutions to our customers,” said Brian Zatulove, CEO and Co-Founder of Emotive.
LA-based Emotive is one of the fastest-growing startups in its space. The company experienced 466% revenue growth in 2020. It has expanded its headquarters in Los Angeles while opening offices this year in both Boston and Atlanta.
To keep up with growing demand, Emotive has tripled the size of its workforce in 2020 and will triple again in 2021 to over 200 employees. The company has also expanded its C-suite with the addition of Adam Waid (Formerly of SalesLoft and Salesforce) as Chief Customer Officer and Oleg Pylnev (Formerly of Honest Company and SpaceX) as Chief Technology Officer. Other key senior leadership appointments include Joe Cuccinelli as VP of Product (Formerly of Drift), Brent Dougherty as VP of Sales (Formerly of Justworks and ZocDoc) and Ben Peterson as VP of Finance
