- Attentive, a personalized mobile messaging SaaS platform for brands, announced it raised $40 million in Series B led by Sequoia
Attentive — a personalized mobile messaging SaaS platform for brands — announced it raised $40 million in Series B funding. This round of funding was led by Sequoia with participation from existing investors Bain Capital Ventures, Eniac Ventures and NextView Ventures, and new investors IVP and High Alpha (a venture fund led by former CEO and co-founder of ExactTarget Scott Dorsey).
Currently, Attentive works with more than 400 innovative retail brands like Sephora, Urban Outfitters, Coach, CB2, and Jack in the Box. And the company has experienced 8 times customer growth in one year.
“CRM is changing. Businesses can’t build a relationship with the modern consumer through email alone,” said Attentive co-founder and CEO Brian Long. “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.”
Consumers are currently spending more time than ever on their mobile devices and the overwhelming majority of that time is spent on messaging apps. And Attentive is leading the way in making mobile messaging a highly profitable revenue channel and the new center of customer relationship management for brands.
With Attentive, mobile messaging can quickly become a top-three digital revenue channel and regularly outperform email marketing in terms of click-through rates and revenue driven per subscriber.
Attentive launched in 2016 by the team behind TapCommerce, which was a leader in mobile app retargeting (acquired by Twitter in 2014). And Attentive saw 250% employee growth in just one year as it expanded its headquarters in New York City while setting up teams in Los Angeles, Boston, Denver, and Atlanta.
“As people increasingly use messaging as a primary form of communication, businesses will too,” added Sequoia Capital partner Pat Grady. “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 is planning to use the funding to further scale its existing business operations by hiring across all departments especially in engineering and sales to support the company’s rapid growth.
“As former investors in CEO Brian Long’s last business, TapCommerce, and the lead investors in Attentive’s earlier Series A round—we’re incredibly excited to have the opportunity to continue to support this team as they pioneer a new chapter in mobile marketing,” explained Bain Capital Ventures partner Scott Friend.
