WebEngage became the first Indian company to raise funding from the newly launched CaaS arm of Social Capital – a California-based VC firm founded by renowned Valley executive Chamath Palihapitiya.

Introduced by Social Capital, CaaS (Capital as a Service) is an entirely new concept of investing. It was built on the principle of data backed investing, wherein companies wouldn’t need to make a traditional pitch. Instead, they would have to fill up a questionnaire, provide raw business data and share access of their cloud services to the firm. The firm would then inspect the numbers to see how good they are. Based on their analysis, Social Capital would come up with the decision to write a check, sometimes without even talking to the founders.

Last week, Avlesh Singh, Co-founder and CEO of WebEngage, announced on the company’s blog about an undisclosed funding from Social Capital via their CaaS vehicle. In the same announcement blog, Avlesh had mentioned WebEngage achieving a solid 3X revenue growth in the last 12 months. Social Capital’s investment in WebEngage comes as a strong validation for a startup operating in a cluttered, disjointed marketing automation landscape.

The company has outlined plans to use the capital to power its product pipeline in 2018. Some of the objectives from the product standpoint include investment in machine learning technology to automatically suggest journeys to users based on their behavioral history, help customers optimize based on global/local benchmarks, integrate easily with other ecosystem players etc.

Speaking on the development, Avlesh said, “It is a validation that we are on the right track. Today, we own only 20% of the wallet share of a customer when it comes to user retention. We want to increase the size of that wallet share to at least 50% on the customer retention front.”

Headquartered in Mumbai, WebEngage is a marketing cloud for consumer businesses. It helps B2C companies retain their customers. Some of the big names who use their product include Flipkart, eBay, GoIbibo, Myntra, Sendgrid, Pluralsight, Taj Hotels, Conde Nast, Souq, etc. Founded in 2011 as an onsite engagement tool, it transitioned into a full-stack marketing cloud over the years. Its primary USP is ‘Journey Designer’ that lets businesses visually design and implement their engagement workflow across multiple channels.