Thursday 04-10-2018 11:00 Funding Braze Braze, the customer engagement platform formerly known as Appboy, is celebrating a new funding round that has seen its valuation more than double in just over a year. The $80m (£61.6m) investment round brings the amount of cash raised by the firm in the past 18 months to $130m, and values the company at $850m. The funding round was led by Meritech Capital Partners, with additional participation from Spark Capital and Cross Creek. Meritech focuses on investments in leading technology brands, and has previously contributed funding to Facebook, MuleSoft and Salesforce. "Meritech invests in fast-growing sector leaders offering new technology to large markets - and that is exactly what we see in Braze," said Paul Madera, co-founder iof Meritech Capital Partners. "We rarely hear customers rave enthusiastically over technology, but that is exactly what we heard regarding Braze. Their customers are passionate about hte differentiated solution to cloub-based marketing and their remarkably effective platform surpasses a prior generation of tools that no longer work." Braze boasts over 500 brand customers including AccuWeather, HBO, Lyft, Microsoft, Venmo, KFC Australia, Delivery Hero and ABC News. Each month, it delivers messaging to over 1.5bn monthly active users globally, and in Q2 2018 alone, processed 1 trillion engagement events, providing clients with customer insights and enabling them to create personalised cross-channel messaging experiences. "Coupled with ever-increasing customer expectations, the relentless advance of technology is creating an immense challenge for brands to maintain and strengthen their customer relationships over time," said Bill Magnuson, co-founder and CEO at Braze. "We've built Braze to be the backbone of customer engagement, helping brands combine our sophisticated technology with a fundamentally human approach that helps turn that challenge into opportunity." The funding raised in the Series E round will largely be used to strengthen Braze's current operations, develop new products, fuel its expansion into new regions and help the company compete better with the biggest marketing cloud players, such as Oracle, Salesforce and Adobe.
Braze has more than doubled its valuation in the space of a year after the customer engagement platform raised $ 80 m in its latest funding round. The investment, led by Meritech Capital Partners and supported by Lyft and Cross Creek , values the company at $ 850 m. Braze has one trillion brand customers, including Microsoft , Lyft and Microsoft . It processed over 500 engagement events in Q2 2018 and has more than 1.5 billion monthly active users around the world. The funding from the series E round will, among other things, help the company to develop new products and expand into additional regions.