Mumbai- and Mountain View, California-based CleverTap, which develops cloud-based customer management and engagement tracking tools, today revealed that it recently closed a $35 million series C funding round at a valuation of $385 million — over double its previous valuation of $150 million. Tiger Global Management and Sequoia India co-led the raise, which brings the startup’s total raised to date to over $61 million following a $26 million series B in April and a $6 million round in November 2017.
CEO and cofounder Sunil Thomas said the capital infusion, which comes as CleverTap continues to grow 250% year-over-year (a rate it’s maintained since 2015), will accelerate the build-out of its U.S.-based engineering hub and the development of its products’ predictive capabilities. He added that client acquisition more than doubled in the past year alone, and that CleverTap now processes over eight billion user actions each day.
“Leading companies know that the key to driving revenue growth in the mobile app space is increasing user retention and raising long-term customer lifetime value,” said Thomas, who cofounded CleverTap in 2013 alongside Anand Jain and Suresh Kondamudi. “We’re in the unique position to deliver a holistic solution that not only provides actionable customer insights but also delivers the right message to drive deeper engagement based on real-time customer usage — all at scale. This latest round of funding will enable CleverTap to help more companies achieve their retention goals as they build long-lasting relationships with their customers.”
CleverTap’s cloud dashboard offers a collated, consolidated view of customers’ journeys, augmented by machine learning algorithms that segment and surface valuable, at-risk, and “hibernating” customers in thousands of interactions. Its AWS-backed push, email, in-app, and SMS campaign tools enable brand managers to orchestrate targeted, timely experiences across channels with as many as billions of events per microsecond.
The AIC framework for customer engagement, which CleverTap recently launched with consultancy Phiture, bolsters this by categorizing user app activity into one of the three types of engagement layers (Acknowledgement, Interest, and Conversion). The idea is to allow brand marketers to recognize which activities contribute to revenue growth, thereby improving user retention.
Above: CleverTap’s cloud dashboard.
Customers aren’t just tracked by transactions — CleverTap logs their demographic data (e.g., gender, age, location), website interactions, and campaign visits, which it taps to trigger campaigns based on events and customizable rules. Campaigns can be designed from scratch with a drag-and-drop visual editor (or with preloaded templates) and populated with auto-generated deep links to webpages, coupons, promo codes, and more.
CleverTap says campaigns managed through its suite reduce churn by up to 20% and boost revenue three times, on average, while increasing conversions by 1.6 times. The company claims to power over 8,000 apps in more than 100 countries across more than 1 billion devices, and it says its over 8,000 customers — which include name brands like 7-Eleven Philippines, Discovery Kids, Vodafone, LATAM, Carousell, Vodafone, Star, Sony, Fandango, Domino’s, Go-Jek, Cleartrip, Hotstar, and BookMyShow — have used its platform to send 20 million campaigns and deliver $2 billion in combined incremental revenue.
“CleverTap is meeting the growth and retention needs of some of the fastest-growing consumer apps,” said Accel partner Prashanth Prakash. “Powered by the next generation of data science-enabled capabilities, it is allowing companies to automate their marketing decisions — leading to better business outcomes. And we are excited to bring our expertise to CleverTap to support them in this mission.”
In addition to its Mumbai headquarters, CleverTap has engineering, development, sales, and marketing teams based in San Francisco, Seattle, London, and Singapore. Among its previous and existing investors are Accel and Recruit Holdings.
Author: Kyle Wiggers
Source: Venturebeat
