Personalized Mobile Messaging Platform Raises $40 Million Series B

Sudipto Ghosh

August 16, 2019

Sequoia Led Series B Funding Round for Attentive, a Personalized Mobile Messaging Platform to Rapidly Scale Customer and Employee Growth, Changing the Way Consumers Interact with Businesses

Mobile messaging has come a long way. Today, mobile messengers are far more interactive, personalized and marketing-friendly. In a major boost to further improve personalization in mobile messaging, Attentive announced its Series B funding earlier this week. With Attentive, brands can seamlessly grow a list of subscribers, send highly personalized messages, power two-way conversations, and measure the impact of each message. Founded in 2016 by Andrew Jones, Brian Long, and Ethan Lo, the company has raised $53 million in two funding rounds.

In an official press release, Attentive confirmed it has raised a $40 million Series B investment. The round was led by Sequoia with participation from existing investors Bain Capital Ventures, Eniac Ventures and NextView Ventures, and new investors IVP and High Alpha.

What is Mobile Messaging Personalization?

Mobile Messaging Personalization can be defined as a mobile-specific customer targeting method to attract, engage, and convert the audience into customers using mobile marketing automation and analytical tools. Leanplum gives us the insights we need to launch, analyze, and scale campaigns for millions of users. The data that Leanplum gathers to engage and optimize is a game-changer and demonstrates how mobile marketing automation maximizes ROI.

According to Leanplum, Mobile Personalization is key to meaningful engagement beyond traditional digital targeting. It laid these personalization options for mobile marketing:

Demographics
Behaviors
User lifecycle stage
Localization
Technology
Data enrichment

We can see a massive thrust to Security and Data Privacy in Mobile Messaging platforms as well.

Every customer expects Digital personalization in their brand interactions. Together with social media messaging, mobile messaging has found itself growing among millennials. Almost 75% of the millennials prefer to either chat or text compared to talking. When it comes to responding to commercial interactions with brands, millennials definitely prefer to chat or text their response.

Customers have a better recollection of chat or text with brands compared to phone calls. When brands add a touch of personalization to their mobile messaging, customers are expected to be more attentive and responsive to messages.

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For example, 28% of US internet users feel that they get a majority of personalized mobile messages from telecommunication providers. Yet, just 13% said they would be interested in receiving personalized messages from those companies. A large population of mobile users expects their retail brands to send in more personalized texts compared to others.

Brian Long, Co-Founder & CEO of Attentive, thinks that personalization of mobile messaging is the next stage of CRM-Automation evolution. Brian said, “CRM is changing. Businesses can’t build a relationship with the modern consumer through email alone. Email performance, as measured by how many subscribers click-through on a message, is down 45% over the last five years. Rather than continuing to shout one-way messages at consumers, smart brands will stay relevant by embracing personalized, real-time, two-way communication channels.”

Will Attentive Be a Game-Changer in the Mobile Messaging Ecosystem?

Currently, Attentive provides decent technology connectivity with all leading CRM and Automation platforms. Customers can seamlessly sync Attentive with the rest of the marketing technology stack making it easy to share info in both directions, amplify ROI of platforms in a centralized data management framework.

Attentive is a personalized mobile messaging platform for innovative brands that can quickly become a top-three revenue channel. Using real-time behavioral data, Attentive automatically sends engaging text messages to each subscriber at every step of the customer lifecycle. 400+ brands rely on Attentive and see strong performance, like 30%+ click-through rates and 25x+ ROI.

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Following the recent Series B funding, Attentive plans to use the additional funding to further scale its existing business operations by hiring across all departments, but especially engineering and sales to support the company’s rapid growth.

Today’s consumers spend more time than ever on their mobile devices—and the overwhelming majority of that time is spent on messaging apps. Attentive is leading the way in making mobile messaging a highly profitable revenue channel and the new center of customer relationship management for brands. Currently, Attentive works with over 400 innovative retail brands such as Sephora, Urban Outfitters, Coach, CB2, and Jack in the Box—and has experienced 8x customer growth in one year. With Attentive, mobile messaging can quickly become a top-three digital revenue channel, regularly outperforming email marketing in terms of click-through rates and revenue-driven per subscriber.

“As people increasingly use messaging as a primary form of communication, businesses will too,” said Pat Grady, partner at Sequoia.

Pat added, “With their mobile messaging platform, Attentive is leading a new category of direct-to-consumer marketing that we believe has huge market potential. We’re thrilled to partner with the entire team as they grow and provide brands with modern, effective tools to better engage with customers.”

Attentive was founded in 2016 by the team behind TapCommerce, the global leader in mobile app retargeting, which was acquired by Twitter in 2014. The company has experienced 250% employee growth in just one year—expanding its headquarters in New York City while establishing team members in Los Angeles, Boston, Denver, and Atlanta.