Tag: ActiveCampaign

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Archive back with fresh funding as it builds community marketing space

Now that a lot of transactions take place in e-commerce, tapping into the community is something merchants are finding is a necessity to continue engaging with customers.

However, that community can live in a bunch of different places online, and Archive is working to harness that community, wherever it is, and provide insights on how the merchant can use that data to grow.

We first caught up with company co-founders Paul Benigeri and Geoffrey Woo last November when the company announced a $4 million seed round led by Stripe. At the time, Archive was going public with its technology aimed at connecting databases and distribution channels so they talk to each other.

Its first products were a Shopify app that automatically detects, classifies and saves Instagram stories relating to a brand, and Archive Communities, which makes influencer marketing programmatic so that brands can more quickly scale their community-building efforts.

Archive.ai aims to free marketers from their monotonous workflows

Archive

Image Credits: Archive / Archive’s team

Since coming out of beta with fewer than 50 customers, Archive closed January with more than 500 customers, and Woo told TechCrunch that the company’s goal is to reach 1,000 by the end of the first quarter. Its app was also the No. 1 trending app on Spotify the first week it was launched.

“We are the first Shopify app to do automatic archival and classification of Instagram stories,” said Woo, who is the company’s chairman. “Just this simple tool has saved a lot of time for merchants, and from that angle, we become the primary interface with marketers to start their workflow.”

Four months later, the company also attracted attention from Tiger Global and Human Capital, which co-led Archive’s latest $8 million seed extension. Battery Ventures, Anti Fund, Red Antler and 305 Ventures also participated in the round, as did a group of individual investors, including Brex COO Michael Tannenbaum, Extend co-founder Rohan Shah and Alloy Automation CEO Sara Du.

This gives Archive a $100 million post-money valuation and brings its total funding amount to $12 million since the company was founded in March 2021, Woo said.

The company was not planning to raise so soon, given that it had just come out of stealth mode and was working to get the company’s story out there, Woo said. However, with merchants struggling with customer acquisition, especially through platforms like Facebook, demand for help in this area grew quickly.

“We’ve always had interest given our background and speed of growth,” Woo added. “We thought it was smart to build out our cap table with Tiger, Human Capital and angels. It is a healthy step up from the initial round led by Stripe and puts us in a strong position to invest in our technology and platform.”

Woo plans to invest the new capital into tripling the technical team of engineers and designers. The company has nearly 10 full-time roles it is looking to fill and is also considering its first full-time marketer and business operation positions.

Woo is a computer scientist by trade and says the company wants to build out the automation and pipes so that customers can focus more on their creative and messages that resonate with their consumers.

It also rebranded to Archive.com and will start a content platform and acquire conferences and newsletters to be a first mover in terms of what the future of marketing should look like. And, as it continues to build out the category of community marketing, it is looking at new areas, like how the changing of privacy settings, web3 and cryptocurrency are affecting audiences.

“Marketing is not top-down anymore, it is bottom-up and all the software, processes and workflow don’t exist for that new wave of marketing,” Woo said. “We are helping provide the automation and software to power the next generation of marketing, which is community marketing.”

10 growth marketing experts share their 2022 predictions and New Year’s resolutions

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Sendlane raises $20M to convert shoppers into loyal customers

Sendlane, a San Diego-based multichannel marketing automation platform, announced Thursday it raised $20 million in Series A funding.

Five Elms Capital and others invested in the round to give Sendlane total funding of $23 million since the company was founded in 2018.

Though the company officially started three years ago, co-founder and CEO Jimmy Kim told TechCrunch he began working on the idea back in 2013 with two other co-founders.

They were all email marketers in different lines of business, but had some common ground in that they were all using email tools they didn’t like. The ones they did like came with too big of a price tag for a small business, Kim said. They set out to build their own email marketing automation platform for customers that wanted to do more than email campaigns and newsletters.

When two other companies Kim was involved in exited in 2017, he decided to put both feet into Sendlane to build it into a system that maximized revenue based on insights and integrations.

In late 2018, the company attracted seed funding from Zing Capital and decided in 2019 to pivot into e-commerce. “Based on our personal backgrounds and looking at the customers we worked with, we realized that is what we did best,” Kim said.

Today, more than 1,700 e-commerce companies use Sendlane’s platform to convert more than 100 points of their customers’ data — abandoned carts, which products sell the best and which marketing channel is working — into engaging communications aimed at driving customer loyalty. The company said it can increase revenue for customers between 20% and 40% on average.

The company itself is growing 100% year over year and seeing over $7 million in annual recurring revenue. It currently has 54 employees right now, and Kim expects to be at around 90 by the end of the year and 150 by the end of 2022. Sendlane currently has more than 20 open roles, he said.

That current and potential growth was a driver for Kim to go after the Series A funding. He said Sendlane became profitable last year, which is why it has not raised a lot of money so far. However, as the rapid adoption of e-commerce continues, Kim wants to be ready for the next wave of competition coming in, which he expects in the next year.

He considers companies like ActiveCampaign and Klaviyo to be in line with Sendlane, but says his company’s differentiator is customer service, boasting short wait times and chats that answer questions in less than 15 seconds.

He is also ready to go after the next vision, which is to unify data and insights to create meaningful interactions between customers and retailers.

“We want to start carving out a new space,” Kim added. “We have a ton of new products coming out in the next 12 to 18 months and want to be the single source for customer journey data insights that provides flexibility for your business to grow.”

Two upcoming tools include Audiences, which will unify customer data and provide insights, and an SMS product for two-way communications and enabled campaign-level sending.

How Klaviyo transformed from a lifestyle business into a $4.15B email titan

 

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ActiveCampaign raises $240M at a $3B valuation as marketing and sales automation come into focus for SMBs

As businesses continue to adopt new digital tools to get their names out into the world, a startup that’s built a sales and marketing platform specifically for small and medium businesses is announcing a big round of funding. ActiveCampaign, which has built what it describes as a “customer experience automation” platform — providing a way not just to run digital campaigns but to follow up aspects of them automatically to make sales and marketing work more efficiently — has closed a $240 million round of funding. The Series C values the Chicago startup at over $3 billion.

The round is being led by a new, big-name investor, Tiger Global, with participation from another new backer Dragoneer, along with Susquehanna Growth Equity and Silversmith Capital Partners, which had both invested previously.

This funding round represents a huge leap for ActiveCampaign. It was only in January 2020 that it raised $100 million, and before that, the company, which was founded in 2003, had only raised $20 million.

But as we have seen in many other ways, the pandemic resulted in a surge of interest among businesses to do more — a lot more — online than ever before, not least because so many people were spending more time at home, carrying out their consumer lives over the internet. That led to ActiveCampaign growing to a customer base of 145,000 customers, up from 90,000 16 months ago.

That points not just to the company already growing at a decent clip before the pandemic, but how it capitalized on that at a time when companies were looking for more tools to run their businesses in the new world.

The growth was not about ActiveCampaign throwing more money into business development, founder and CEO Jason VandeBoom said in an interview. “It was the network effect of people finding success. Even today, organic word of mouth is our primary driver.”

The company’s tools fit into a wider overall trend in the world of business: automation, built on the back of new, cloud-based technology, is being adopted to carry out some of the less interesting and repetitive aspects of running a business.

In the case of sales, an example of what ActiveCampaign might provide is a way for an e-commerce business to identify when a logged-in customer (that is, a user who has an account already and is signed in) might have ‘abandoned’ a visit to a site before buying a product that had already been searched for, or clicked on, or even added to a cart. In these cases, it sends an email to customers reminding them of those items, with options for other follow-ups, in the event that the choice was due to being distracted or having second thoughts that might be persuaded otherwise.

Users can opt-out of these, but they can be useful given the genuine distraction exercise that is browsing online — with all of the unrelated notifications, plus other options for considering a purchase. Tellingly, ActiveCampaign integrates with 850 different apps, a measure of just how fragmented the online landscape is, and also how many ways your attention might be distracted, or snagged depending on your perspective.

Abandoned carts can cost a company, in aggregate, a lot of lost revenue, yet chasing those down is not the kind of task that a company would typically assign to a valuable employee to carry out. And that’s where companies like ActiveCampaign come in.

This, plus some 500 other actions like it around sales and marketing campaigns — Vandenboom calls them “recipes” — some of which have been contributed by ActiveCampaign’s own users, form the basis of the company’s platform.

The marketing and sales automation market is estimated to be worth billions of dollars today, and, thanks to the rise of social media and simply more places to spend time online (and more time spent online) is expected to be worth more than $8 billion by 2027, so it’s going after a lucrative and much-used tool for doing business online. (And others are looking at it as well, of couse, including newer entrants like Shopify coming from a different angle to the same problem. Shopify today is a valued partner of the company, Vandeboom said when I asked him about it.)

That gives ActiveCampaign not just a big opportunity to continue targeting, but possibly also makes it a target itself, for an acquisition.

The other key aspect of ActiveCampaign’s growth that is worth watching is related to its customers. While the company has a client base that includes recognized names like the Museum of Science and Industry based out of ActiveCampaign’s hometown, it also has some 145,000 others across nearly 200 countries with a big emphasis on small and medium businesses.

SMBs form the vast majority of all businesses globally, collectively representing a huge win for tech companies that can capture them as customers. But traditionally, they have proven to be a challenging sector, given that they cover so many different verticals, are in many ways more price-sensitive than their enterprise-sized counterparts, among other factors.

So for ActiveCampaign to have found successful traction with SMBs — including with pricing that works for many of them (using it starts at $9 for accounts with less than 500 contacts) — is likely another reason why the startup has caught the eye of investors keen to back winning horses.

While the company did not need to raise money, Vandeboom said he “saw it as an opportunity to bring in more partners, saying that investors like how it purposely went after the idea of customer experience not on vertical or locale.”

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Adding three more companies to the $100M ARR club

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

When we kicked off our series on private companies that have reached $100 million ARR, we didn’t expect it to last. Maybe a piece or two, but nothing more. Today’s entry should bring us past the thirty company mark.

It was less than a month ago that we added eight names to the club in a single post (HeadSpin, UiPath, DigitalOcean, BounceX, Wrike, Aeris, Podium and Lucid), the latter two of which had recently raised capital, announcing their revenue milestones at the same time. This morning, we’re appending just three names, but pay attention all the same.

We joked in February that our running tally of growth-oriented, private companies that had reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue read like a list of firms that either could, or should go public in short order. Since then, the IPO market has largely closed in light of COVID-19, so I suppose we’re more adding to the backlog than queuing up companies for an S-1.

Either way, let’s talk about ActiveCampaign, Recorded Future, and ON24 this morning!

New names

We’ll start, then, with Recorded Future .

Recorded Future

Boston-based Recorded Future, a cybersecurity company focused on “threat intelligence,” announced that it crossed the $100 million ARR mark recently, making the firm a success story for its city. But as with so many companies that we add to our list, its inclusion is slightly fraught.