Company Closeup: CleverTap - The Platform For Any Mobile App
CleverTap leverages AI and machine learning (ML) to deliver timely, relevant engagement opportunities for businesses. Customers are becoming more demanding, and marketers have put in the effort to keep up. Maintaining a brand presence across all possible channels boosts businesses’ credibility and connects them to their target audience. Customers expect their experience with the brand […]
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CleverTap leverages AI and machine learning (ML) to deliver timely, relevant engagement opportunities for businesses.
Customers are becoming more demanding, and marketers have put in the effort to keep up. Maintaining a brand presence across all possible channels boosts businesses’ credibility and connects them to their target audience. Customers expect their experience with the brand to be consistent across all platforms, and omnichannel marketing allows customers to engage with and buy. Empowering customers in this way is key for retention rates. Every day, CleverTap, a customer engagement and retention platform, claims it can process more than 10 billion interactions across its AI-powered platform to enable enterprises to improve mobile user retention and conversion rates.
It’s over 10,000 clients, including Daimler, The Premier League, Domino’s, OLX, Gojek, AirAsia, Sony, Vodafone, and Cleartrip, rely on it to increase user engagement, retention and grow long term revenue.
The company is backed by leading venture capital firms, including Sequoia, Tiger Global Management, Accel, and Recruit Holdings, and is headquartered in Mountain View, California, with offices in Amsterdam, Singapore, Dubai, and Mumbai.
In 2013, Anand Jain Suresh Kondamudi and Sunil Thomas started CleverTap when they realised that as a user, the world was getting slightly more complex, accessing the same product across different platforms — phone, tablet, and laptop. Another trend was that the user’s attention span was decreasing, and brands were not keeping up. So they knew communications needed to be timely and more straightforward.
A lot of brands spent money on user attention, but nobody was actually solving the problem. So the trio thought about how they could help retain, engage and convert users. Can these brands understand the user’s unexpressed and expressed needs and also anticipate their needs?
BookMyShow was the first customer in October 2013. CleverTap announced its US launch in September 2015 during TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield in San Francisco. During this time, the company also changed its trading name from WizRocket to CleverTap.
Also Read: Getting App Users to Stay
Milestones
- In 2013, Anand Jain, Suresh Kondamudi and Sunil Thomas started CleverTap.
- In 2014, it secured a seed funding of $1.6 million from Accel.
- In 2015, it secured an additional Series A funding of $8 million from Accel and Sequoia Capital and launched a TechCrunch Disrupt.
- In 2017, it secured an additional $6 million from existing and new investor RSP India Fund, the investment subsidiary of Recruit Holdings. TiE Silicon Valley included CleverTap in its list of TiE50, the World’s 50 Most Promising Technology Startups. In addition, Sunil Thomas, CEO of the company, was named one of the 25 Marketing Technology Trailblazers in 2017 by Advertising Age.
- In 2019, it raised $26 million in Series B investment from Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global Management, and Accel and Series C investment of $35 million led by Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global Management, bringing the total investment to over $77 million.
- In 2020, CleverTap strengthened its Global Presence with Expansion into the Middle East. Also, in the same year, with the help of CleverTap, Ketto, Asia’s crowdfunding platform, raised money for charitable causes.
- In 2020, 2021, CleverTap has been named Forbes’ Best Startup Employer in America.
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In 2021, CleverTap expanded offerings into Turkey Amid Extreme Growth in the Middle East.
Using AI and ML To Help Big Brands
The founders were unanimous on a high-quality user experience that could be achieved when an app was useful, relevant, and timely. This meant an app that “understands the user” and can show the right content to the right user, on the right channel, and at the right time. This necessitated a foundation built on data.
The team incorporated AI and ML to improve relevancy and optimise the user experience. Understanding user context and intent in real-time, with the ability to predict the user behaviour, led to relevant engagement opportunities. The platform understood user retention is a ubiquitous problem that every digital business wants to solve.
According to Thomas, “An app loses on average about 90 per cent of its users within the first 90 days. We have always believed that data and the ability to make data actionable in real-time is the necessary foundation to solve this problem. It is not just user behaviour data; contextual data like location, time, preferences, product catalogue, weather and more helps understand the user’s context and intent at any given moment.”
The CleverTap technology has been purpose-built to solve this problem, it’s what primarily differentiates the team from the rest in the market.
Also Read: Are You Using Push Notifications? Almost Everyone Is.
Product portfolio
All-in-one platform: Behavioral analytics, audience segmentation, and cross-channel messaging in a single platform. It claims that its customers have reduced uninstalls by 30 per cent and improved retention by five times.
Boost engagement across touchpoints: Deliver a seamless omnichannel experience at every lifecycle stage with messaging campaigns across 12 channels, including push, email, in-app, WhatsApp.
Real-time audience analytics: From cohort analysis and conversion funnels to profile data and uninstall tracking, its platform has all the behavioural analytics.
Individualisation at scale: Connect data in meaningful ways to personalise messages, accelerate product discovery with predictive recommendations, and build automated campaigns.
Built for speed, security, and scale: The platform can process over 10 billion data points and send over two billion communications every day.
Led by the Best
What started as a vision has now grown into a global SaaS brand.
Sunil Thomas, CEO & Co-founder: He is a technologist and drives the company’s strategic vision while also managing investor relations. He has previously held CTO roles at startups and companies like Network18 and Infospace Inc. Anand Jain, CSO & Co-founder: He leads strategy at CleverTap. He is passionate about all things tech. He previously worked with Network18, Burrp!, Motorola, and AT&T Wireless. Suresh Kondamudi, CTO & Co-founder: He leads engineering at CleverTap, responsible for delivering large scale high-performance systems. He has held leadership positions at ngpay and Network18.
Also Read: Take The Stress Out Of Marketing, Map Your Customer Journey
Engage Customers Across Each Micro-moment
A smart, all-in-one platform packed with engagement and analytics tools that engage users across the mobile, web, and in-app experience, purpose-built tools for optimising campaigns to visually build and deliver omnichannel campaigns. It also creates actionable segments with ease and perfect targeting, real-time analytics to uncover user trends and track behaviours, a guided framework to move users across lifecycle stages.
The smart platform engages customers to interact with the brand on various touch-points before making the final purchase and assist businesses with contextual messages throughout their journey to deliver an amazing experience.
It helps you understand your users and their preference to correlate data across multiple touchpoints using powerful APIs to get a real-time view of your business with customised reports and helps in driving business growth with live-user segments.
