Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global Lead $26 Mn Round in CleverTap

Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global Management have invested $26 Mn (approx INR 180 Cr) in San Francisco and Mumbai-based WizRocket, the parent company of CleverTap, a mobile marketing platform. Accel Partner an existing investor in CleverTap, also participated in the round.

The new funding brings the company’s valuation to more than $150 Mn. According to the company, its revenue has been growing at 250% year-over-year since 2015, driving over $2 Bn in incremental revenue for its customers.

Founded in 2013, by Anand Jain, Sunil Thomas and Suresh Kondamudi who quit their lucrative jobs at Network18 to build the customised platform which could analyse user behaviour, group them into multiple groups and on the basis of what they have done or not done, send them push notifications, emails, SMSes, etc.

Scott Shleifer, partner at Tiger Global said that, “Marketing technology is undergoing rapid transformation, and we believe CleverTap is well positioned to help consumer businesses drive materially higher customer lifetime values.”

CleverTap’s cofounder, Anand Jain said, “We want to double down our efforts in machine learning and Artificial Intelligence, we want to expand our team, add more engineers and data scientists”

CleverTap has so far raised a total of $41 Mn of funding in three rounds rounds.

CleverTap’s Growth

CleverTap recently opened its APAC headquarters in Singapore and has expanded its presence in the Americas and Europe to serve rapidly-scaling brands. The company also plans on expanding its  geographic presence. “We will hopefully expand into Europe this year and expand our presence in the US,” Jain said.

It counts over 8,000 companies including Vodafone, Star, Sony, Domino’s Pizza, GO-JEK, Cleartrip and BookMyShow among its clients.

One of CleverTap’s services is to send time-sensitive campaigns activated by real-time user activity or inactivity. The mobile networking platform also sends campaigns based on when users are most likely to engage with the brand, for example, campaigns designed around IPL.

The Mobile Marketing Space

Urban Airship, another competitor CleverTap has raised $25 million in Series F funding. Also backed by Sequoia, Amplitude is a larger rival of CleverTap with over 20,000 clients. Other competitors of CleverTap are WebEngage, Kahuna, Lean Plum etc,. According to data from Grand View Research, the mobile marketing market is expected to reach $223.41 Bn by 2025 growing at a CAGR of 22.8% in the said period.