Letter From The CEO: Series E Funding, Sustainable Growth, and More

  • UPDATED: 10 July 2023
  • 3 min read
article

Reading Time: 3 minutes

I am happy to share that MoEngage has raised USD 77 million in Series E funding. This round is led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management and B Capital, with participation from the existing investors Steadview Capital, Multiples Alternate Asset Management, Eight Roads Ventures, and Matrix Partners India.

When we started MoEngage, we were clear that we wanted to build a long-term sustainable business. We defined five critical pillars:

  • Build a trusted, world-class product.
  • Grow revenue at a healthy rate in a capital-efficient manner.
  • Be obsessed with delighting our customers.
  • Build an ecosystem of partners and create a peer-led learning community for marketers and product owners.
  • Inculcate a culture of transparency, ownership, humility, and customer-centricity.

The world around us changed a lot over the last few years – from the lows of the pandemic to the euphoria of rocketing valuations. We focused on the five pillars through all the changes and uncertainties. If one peeks into our internal OKR tool, they’ll find that most people at MoEngage have goals and result metrics that align with these five pillars.

This level of focus has helped us navigate the changing landscape, shut out the noise, and execute with clarity. Today, we have highly healthy metrics across all our focus areas:

  1. Product Innovation, Scale, and Reliability: If you look at the current platforms available for multi-channel customer engagement, you will notice that most are campaign-centric. Almost all the tools provide “Campaign automation,” “Campaign workflows,” or “Campaign analytics.” These tools place the “campaign” at the center and build functionalities around it. We decided to put the “customer” at the center. Our product empowers marketers to be more “customer-centric” through AI-driven insights to create cross-channel experiences that customers love. And we do this reliably at a massive scale by engaging 1.2B monthly active users through 90B+ messages every month!
  2. Revenue Growth in a Capital-efficient Manner: We have grown rapidly over the past few years, yet we have done so efficiently. We never believed in the philosophy of “growth at any cost.” We grew our annualized recurring revenue [ARR] 7x between 2018-22. In the last 12 months alone, our ARR has more than doubled. It’s also important to note that our growth is global – not limited to one region or segment. We now have 1200+ customers across 35 countries, supported by 650+ employees in 10 worldwide offices. Even while growing globally and rapidly in a competitive landscape – Our burn multiple (Net Burn / Net New ARR) hasn’t crossed 1x during the scale-up.
  3. Winning Customer Love: Customer retention and delight are essential indicators of any business’s long-term health. A customer-first mindset is a crucial part of our culture at MoEngage. We look at Net Revenue Retention [NRR] as a key indicator that customers see value in our product, are happy with our support, and feel strongly connected to our brand. Our NRR in the last 12 months was 136% – this is in line with the NRR of some of the best run SaaS companies worldwide.
  4. Partner Ecosystem and #GROWTH Community: We know that delivering delightful customer experiences is a team game. The modern marketing tech stack has many layers and tools – we need to play well with other tools in the ecosystem. Our customers also look for consulting help to provide a complete solution and not just a product. Over the years, we have built an ecosystem of 50+ technology partners and 100+ agency & consulting partners worldwide. In addition, we have built #GROWTH, an exclusive platform for marketers and product owners to learn from each other through networking events, masterclasses, learning modules, and more. #GROWTH has seen participation from marketing and product leaders who are driving growth for 100s of top brands across the globe. We will continue our investments in strengthening our partner ecosystem and build #GROWTH to be the most trusted community for peer networking and learning.
  5. Transparent and Customer-centric Culture: It’s our people that form our business. We nearly doubled our headcount in the last 12 months, and we now have employees across the U.S., Brazil, UK, Germany, Dubai, India, Singapore, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia. It’s not easy for a globally distributed team that works remotely to align and remain razor-focused on our five business pillars. I am so grateful to the team for stepping up, sharing our beliefs and values, and contributing to the growth of MoEngage. I feel that it’s a strong validation of the kind of team we have and the culture they bring at MoEngage – that enables everyone to own projects, collaborate, learn, and contribute meaningfully.

Looking Into the Future: Accelerated Growth in Product Innovation and Global Expansion

We will use the additional funds to deepen our geographical footprints in the U.S., Europe, Asia, and the Middle East markets and serve our customers better with further investments in Customer Success. We are expanding into new territories like Latin America, Australia, and New Zealand with local teams. We have ambitious plans to invest in product innovation and solve consumer brands’ modern engagement challenges. We will also explore strategic acquisitions that can help extend our platform capabilities and provide more value to our customers.

P.S.: Here are our investors at B Capital sharing their thoughts on their investment in MoEngage.