Businesses that can build a personal relationship with customers are more likely to be loyal. It is becoming more difficult for businesses to connect with their customers as they change, particularly in the last 18 months.
Optimove is a company that specializes in customer relationship marketing. They want to delight customers and keep them coming back. Summit Partners led a $75 million investment in the company with offices in Tel Aviv and New York.
Pini Yakuel, CEO of SaaS, founded the company in 2012 to connect customers to brands and to use artificial intelligence to customer data to orchestrate and scale the right message to the right person at the right moment, Yakuel explained to TechCrunch.
It's easy to create three to five customer journeys per month. But when you want to scale up and do thousands of them, it is difficult. All messages are managed by AI orchestrators. You can now define your message, and the marketer will have all the data. He/she can then get feedback and analyze the customer segment.
Yakuel stated that multichannel marketing will grow to $28 billion globally by 2027. It is important to identify the customers of a brand and to target them. The data analysis by Optimoves provides insight into how to achieve and attribute measurable improvements in areas such as conversion, churn and lifetime value for each campaign and customer.
Optimove, prior to this investment was self-funded for the first four year until it raised $20 million. Yakuel stated that the company has not used the money, but it has been profitable. Summit Partners is Summit Partners' purchase of the company's previous investors. This gives him a greater commitment to the company.
He said that it is a transitional phase and a step into a new era. Given the current climate in fundraising, it felt right for us. We want to do some M&A, build our platform, but it all must be seamless. A business might also need to integrate with three or four other solutions in order to be able to use us today. We can become better partners if we have some of these capabilities.
The company will double its 300-strong staff over the next two year and invest in technology and R&D to support its 500 brand customers such as BetMGMGM, Papa Johns, and Staples.
The company has seen 40% in recurring revenue over the past year and sends more than 23 million optimized messages per year via email, mobile ad platforms, and other channels to more than 3 billion customers each year. Yakuel anticipates that the next milestone for the company will be an initial public offer in three years.
The company also announced that Summit Partners' head for Europe, Han Sikkens and Steffan Peyer are joining its board.
Peyer stated that Summit invests in companies that focus on marketing technology and seek to understand the customer journey. This is especially important given the global pandemic. Optimove's ability to engage with existing users is key, as it reduces the cost of acquiring customers.
They have created a sophisticated customer platform with an advanced analytics orchestration engine. This is based on understanding the customer's behavior and targeting micro segments campaigns to increase engagement. Also, Peyer stated that there may be other products that could possibly be sold to this customer. They have a solid backend infrastructure that allows them to process large amounts of data and use it in real-time.
