Optimove generates $20m in growth funding
Optimove has raised $20 million (€17.8 million) in growth funding from private equity investment firm Israel Growth Partners.
Confirming the news in a statement, the company said it will use the new funds to grow its R&D efforts, as well as to support its sales and marketing organisation and hire aggressively in the US market.
The round marks the first funding for Optimove and comes after three straight years of 100% year-over-year growth for the company, which counts the likes of Zynga amongst its client base.
Optimove operates the ‘Customer Marketing Cloud’, which sends more than four billion targeted, personalised messages to 900 million customers each year via email, Facebook, Google Ads, SMS, push notifications, and other channels.
As part of the funding agreement, Moshe Lichtman, co-founder and general partner of Israel Growth Partners, will join the Optimove board of directors.
“Our mission is to empower customer-centric brands to conduct smarter, emotionally-intelligent marketing campaigns,” Optimove founder and chief executive Pini Yakuel said.
“We were in a fortunate position where we never needed to raise venture capital money in order to grow, but we decided to take on a growth round at this point in the company’s evolution because we are already stable and profitable and we are now ready to accelerate our growth.
“I’m excited to work with Moshe Lichtman and Haim Shani, who have such tremendous experience in the tech field.”
Lichtman, of Israel Growth Partners, added: “Optimove is incredibly well positioned to succeed as the leading customer marketing platform.
“Not only have they built an extremely sophisticated technology platform that gets rave reviews from all of its customers, but Pini and his team have been able to turn Optimove into a well-oiled machine that is poised for extreme growth and category leadership.”
Related article: GVC names Optimove as enterprise customer marketing vendor