- Klaviyo — a customer data and marketing platform for online businesses — announced recently that it has raised $200 million in Series C funding led by Accel. These are the details.
Klaviyo — a customer data and marketing platform for online businesses — announced recently that it has raised $200 million in Series C funding led by Accel with participation from existing investor Summit Partners. This round of funding brings Klaviyo’s total funding to date to $358.5 million.
And the investment will help further fuel Klaviyo’s rapid growth through R&D, hiring, increased sales, customer support, and international expansion. Plus the company also announced it has added Accel’s Ping Li to its board.
As consumers’ purchases have increasingly shifted online during the COVID-19 pandemic and companies of all sizes have been heavily focused on optimizing their digital presence whether it is a brick and mortar retailer moving online for the first time or an existing e-commerce brands doubling down on efforts to deliver highly personalized communications and service. Businesses need customer data to inform their marketing efforts. And Klaviyo’s software was designed to easily integrate with leading e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, Stripe, and WooCommerce, thus applying AI and machine learning algorithms to pull in customer data to generate audience insights, and automate and customize relevant communications, advertising, and marketing campaigns.
The Klaviyo platform helps emphasize and measure revenue generated, not just web traffic, click-through, and email open rates. And in 2020, Klaviyo’s software has helped generate over $11 billion in sales for its customers, saving them about hundred of millions of dollars in online advertising costs. Plus Klaviyo software also provides businesses with the necessary data to convert sales via their own sites rather than through outside marketplaces — which typically take 8-15% in fees for each sale.
Klaviyo’s customer base has doubled over the year. And the company now serves over 50,000 customers ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies in more than 125 countries.
Launched in 2012, Klaviyo was bootstrapped for three years before taking outside funding and is profitable. And the company raised just $8.5 million in outside investment before it closed a $150M Series B round last March led by Summit Partners. The new funding round from Accel and Summit Partners will help accelerate growth and enable Klaviyo to remain focused on bolstering customer support and building out the platform’s AI and machine learning capabilities to engineer and design the future of guided software.
Based in Boston, Klaviyo currently has 500 employees (with over 300 in Massachusetts). And the company intends to double headcount to 1,000 by the end of 2021 with hiring predominantly for Boston-based engineering and design positions.
KEY QUOTES:
“Klaviyo helps online businesses of any size break out of the one-email-fits-all marketing mentality, because blanket communications aren’t effective for anyone. Every online customer has unique preferences that influence how and where they make purchases and we’re able to help sellers leverage their own customer data to create an experience they control — one that is ultimately measured in revenues generated, not pages viewed.”
— Klaviyo co-founder and CEO, Andrew Bialecki
“Klaviyo has given us one-of-a-kind insights and levers to boost revenue by double-digit percentages year after year. The team, tools, and service are top-tier and constantly improving. It feels like Klaviyo and Chubbies are growing hand-in-hand and that’s a better partnership than we could ever have asked for.”
— Erich Hellstrom, Manager of Retention Marketing, Chubbies, a men’s shorts online retailer
“The Klaviyo team blends product vision, technical talent and customer centricity – and we believe the company’s growth trajectory underscores the true power of this combination. Klaviyo continues to attract talented members to its growing team, and Summit’s second investment represents our continued confidence in this team and their mission: to change the playing field in commerce and offer brands of all sizes a release from the expensive confines of Big Tech control over ads and marketplace sales – and the chance to own their growth.”
— Michael Medici, Klaviyo board member and Managing Director of Summit Partners
