Blueshift is a company that provides AI-powered customer engagement across all channels. And now, marketers can leverage their data with AI to automate customer engagement across the customer lifecycle intelligently. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Blueshift co-founder and CEO Vijay Chittoor to learn more about the company.
Vijay Chittoor’s Background
What is Vijay Chittoor’s background? Chittoor said:
“I am the CEO and co-founder of Blueshift, a company pioneering AI-powered marketing. Before launching Blueshift, my career spanned nearly a decade at the intersection of Marketing and Artificial Intelligence. I previously co-founded the social e-commerce company Mertado, which Groupon acquired to become Groupon Goods. Before that, I was an early employee at Kosmix, an AI company later acquired by Walmart and rebranded as WalmartLabs.”
“This unique combination of experiences, building a consumer brand and building AI products, provided me with the insights that led me to start Blueshift.”
Formation Of The Company
How did the idea for the company come together? Chittoor shared:
“In our previous experience, my co-founders and I experienced firsthand the pain we set out to solve with Blueshift. At Walmart & Groupon, we saw how the customer journey was becoming more complex and fragmented due to the emergence of more channels. At the same time, the amount of first-party customer data was growing due to the emergence of digital and mobile channels, and digitization was increasing even in offline channels.”
“This presented a unique opportunity for marketers to learn about each customer’s intents and interests and engage them intelligently at every touchpoint in their journey. However, legacy technologies built with a channel-centric mindset prevented marketers from achieving this holy grail. As a result, marketers were drowning in operational complexity and could not focus on their customers.”
“At Blueshift, our goal is to simplify this complexity. Our mission is to empower marketers with customer data and intelligence that is effortlessly actionable on every channel. With Blueshift, marketers can now unify omnichannel data and leverage AI to make real-time decisions about the “who, what, when, and where” of engaging each customer.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Chittoor reflected:
“My favorite memories are seeing our team come together to overcome challenging situations. For instance, when confronted with the COVID shutdowns, we rapidly adapted to a new way of working virtually and became better at asynchronous communications.
“We were able to adjust our marketing rapidly, and we were among the first to launch a virtual customer conference, ‘Blueshift Engage,’ with top-notch speakers. We rolled out several product innovations that helped our customers rapidly digitize their engagement. All of these led to rapid revenue growth for Blueshift, and we were featured in the Deloitte Fast 500 list of the fastest-growing tech companies in North America.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Chittoor explained:
“Through the Blueshift Intelligent Customer Engagement platform, marketers can create highly personalized, customer-centric experiences across all touchpoints. The integrated platform does not require specialized expertise.”
“The platform helps create rich customer profiles via an integrated Customer Data Platform (CDP) and activates and orchestrates customer interactions via a Cross-Channel Marketing Hub (CCMH). The platform is enhanced by Customer AI, which provides predictive insights and recommendations to help scale engagement on a 1-to-1 basis.”
Challenges Placed
What challenges have Chittoor and the team faced in building the company? Chittoor acknowledged:
“One key challenge driving AI adoption in the enterprise, especially in customer engagement, is gaining trust in AI’s decision-making.”
“The strong adoption of Blueshift’s Customer AI has only been possible because of our investments in making the user experience around AI intuitive & explainable instead of being a black box. We have made it easy for marketers to understand Customer AI’s outputs and layer their own strategic and creative insights. Due to this, marketers and data teams can confidently leverage Blueshift’s Customer AI in cross-channel customer communications.”
Evolution Of The Company’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since its launch? Chittoor noted:
“We have maintained a strong cadence of product releases to continue evolving our offering along three core pillars:
- First, we are on a path to becoming an orchestration hub for all customer engagement across the enterprise. We started by enabling brands to orchestrate their marketing messages and, over time, built out an entire Application Hub that integrates with our journey builder to help orchestrate every aspect of the customer journey, from digital ads to website experiences and handoffs to sales and service teams.
- Second, we have focused on developing AI that can become an extension of the core marketing team. We started with Predictive AI, but more recently, we have combined that with Generative AI and Agentic AI to give smaller marketing teams superpowers.
- Finally, we continue to evolve our technology to make collaboration seamless across the enterprise. This includes integrations with a wide variety of technologies and capabilities, such as modular and reusable components and extensible permission management, to unlock distributed operations across the enterprise.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Chittoor cited:
“We have achieved several significant milestones over the past 10 years since our founding, validating the company’s technology, its impact on customers, and leadership in the market. Some of these include:
- USPTO has awarded us a patent for our AI-powered technology.
- Forrester Research has published a report showing that Blueshift drives an ROI of 781% for our customers.
- We have consistently been rated a leader on customer review platforms like G2, and the analyst firm Gartner has labeled Blueshift a Cool Vendor for AI in Marketing.”
Customer Success Stories
When asking Chittoor about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“Sure, here are three examples:
Five Below, a national retailer, curates trendy merchandise that kids, teens & adults want for $5 or less. This Blueshift customer faced challenges with static, batch-and-blast email campaigns that lacked product recommendations and dynamic content. Their digital marketing efforts also aimed to drive both online and in-store traffic. By leveraging the Blueshift customer engagement platform, Five Below delivered consistent, personalized messages at the right frequency through customers’ preferred channels. This approach yielded remarkable results, including a 41% open rate, a 5.3% click-through rate, and an impressive 21% conversion of unique clicks into purchases. Additionally, by using Customer AI for predictive recommendations, they achieved a 22% increase in sales.
Ent Credit Union is the largest credit union in Colorado. It partnered with Blueshift to unify and activate its member data, enabling personalized digital experiences through advanced segmentation and cross-channel campaign orchestration. This integration led to a 32% increase in member engagement and improved operational efficiency. According to Ben Savage, the Director of Digital Marketing at Ent Credit Union, the time required to create a target segment was reduced from approximately 25 hours over two weeks to just minutes.
Tradera, a leading Swedish e-commerce marketplace with over 5 million weekly visits, sought a solution to unify and activate data from its website, mobile app, and email campaigns. Their goal was to deliver personalized auction recommendations to drive user engagement, increase sales, and optimize ad spend, all while integrating seamlessly with their martech stack. By implementing the Blueshift platform, Tradera achieved impressive results, including a 131% increase in sales through personalized recommendations, a 40% boost in homepage click-through rates, and 2.5x higher email open rates.”
Funding
When asking Chittoor about the company’s funding details, he revealed:
“Blueshift’s rapid revenue growth has led to it being recognized multiple times in the Deloitte Technology Fast 500, ranking the fastest-growing technology companies in North America. We have raised $65M in venture capital.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Chittoor assessed:
“We estimate the TAM for B2C MarTech solutions focused on Customer Engagement to be approximately $30B. The adoption of AI is a key driver of this market’s growth. A McKinsey study states, ‘The productivity of marketing alone due to generative AI could increase between 5 and 15 percent of total marketing spend, worth about $463 billion annually.’
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Chittoor affirmed:
“Blueshift eliminates the need to choose between best-in-class point solutions and all-in-one platforms. Powered by a customer data platform and patented AI technology integrated with a cross-channel marketing hub, we offer top-tier data modeling, segmentation, recommendations, and predictive intelligence—all easily actionable across every channel and at every stage of the customer journey.”
“Our unified platform empowers brands to create highly personalized, customer-centric experiences across all touchpoints without requiring specialized expertise. The result? Measurable improvements in business outcomes, faster time-to-value, and a lower total cost of ownership.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future goals? Chittoor concluded:
“Our mission is to unlock every brand’s potential to engage customers on a 1-to-1 level by turning data and intelligence into effortless, actionable insights across every marketing channel. Our future goals are centered around two core themes stemming from this mission: investing in the platform’s continued innovation, especially around actionable Artificial Intelligence, and growing our customer base by making the platform easier to adopt and expanding our market presence.”
“We are excited about innovations we are rolling out in the realm of Agentic AI systems, which are designed to be goal-oriented, adaptable, autonomous, and perform these tasks in real-time. In this new form, AI can accomplish much of the heavy lifting that marketing and operations teams are burdened with, such as autonomously designing and executing tests based on high-level guidance from marketers.”
