Knock: Notification Infrastructure Company Raises $12 Million

By Amit Chowdhry • Feb 18, 2024

Knock – a leading notification infrastructure provider – announced it has raised a $12 million Series A led by Craft Ventures, bringing the total funding to $18 million. And existing investors Afore Capital and Preface Capital also joined the round. Over 200 enterprises, including Webflow, Vercel, Vidyard, and Amplitude, depend on Knock to build multi-channel product experiences that drive engagement and retention. And as part of the funding round, David Sacks, co-founder and partner at Craft Ventures, will also join Knock’s Board.

Launched in 2021, Knock gives developers a customer engagement platform tailored to their workflow. And the customer engagement market grew to $20 billion in recent years. But the majority from banking notifications to conversion-lifting user experiences still runs on outdated systems that prevent notifications from reaching users at the right moment. And these platforms typically are sold to marketers and these high-volume, production-risk systems are often packaged in rigid dashboards that don’t meet developers’ needs. Knock puts notifications in context so engineering teams can manage them as part of their CI environment and deployment pipeline, with better documentation, powerful API primitives, and SDKs to ensure ease of launch and use. Knock’s APIs allow customization that can’t be built anywhere else.

KEY QUOTES:

“Knock is the tool we wish we had in our past roles. Every product needs to engage with its customers, but until now, every team has had to build and scale that infrastructure in-house or work with tools not designed for the modern developer workflow. We started Knock to provide developers and product teams with flexible, API-first customer engagement that’s ready for production. We’re excited that this capital will enable us to scale our platform and to help improve notifications for users of software everywhere.”

  • Sam Seely, CEO and co-founder of Knock

“We share an aligned worldview with the Knock team: we believe in the power of great DX and API-first tooling to deliver business outcomes. Knock has helped us deliver on ours, with an experience that’s great for our team — and our users. I’m proud to be an investor in and a customer of Knock.

  • Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, who is also an angel investor

“Everyone has seen the notification bell in their apps. It’s ubiquitous as the way to notify users about new activity. The problem is that every app ends up reinventing the wheel, hacking this together, and struggling to maintain it. It would make a lot more sense for developers to outsource their notification infrastructure. Now they can.”

  • David Sacks, co-founder and partner at Craft Ventures