MoEngage AI-POWERED MARKETING PLATFORM
THE BENGALURU-BASED START-UP ENABLES MARKETERS TO TARGET CUSTOMERS WITH THE HELP OF MACHINE LEARNING.
1) The Founders IIT-Kharagpur alumni Raviteja Dodda and Yashwanth Kumar had initially developed a mobile app called DelightCircle to help customers find discounts and other offers in retail stores near them. But they soon realised how digital businesses were struggling to enhance customer engagement and increase conversion rates. The duo, therefore, decided to launch an AI-powered analytics and customer engagement platform that would provide insights into better customer targeting.
2) How It Works
“At MoEngage, we are essentially developing an Internet generation marketing platform, built for a mobile-first world,” says Dodda. The start-up integrates APKs or APIs with the apps or websites of its customers to track enduser behaviour on those platforms, based on which push notifications, in-app recommendations and e-mails can be sent to target users.
3) The Backers
The start-up is funded by Helion Venture Partners, Exfinity Ventures, Snapdeal co-founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, TaxiForSure co-founder Raghunandan G and Facebook executive Anand Chandrasekaran, among others. It has raised over $5 million in two rounds of funding.
4) Growth
It caters to a number of behemoths, including Flipkart, Oyo Rooms, Airtel, Idea, Ganaa and Wynk Music in India and Tokopedia, Deutsche Bank and Samsung in the global market. It had a gross revenue of `5.23 crore in FY2016/17 as per MCA data Right now, its solutions are reactive, but MoEngage is planning to introduce predictive analytics and assistance so that marketers can act faster. The company charges each customer on the basis of monthly active users.
5) Challenges
MoEngage claims it is currently profiling one-fifth of the smartphone users in India and delivering around one billion personalised interactions. While this is a boon for marketers, given the recent incidents of data breaches, it can turn out to be a tough challenge for the company. Although the company says it has adequate security measures in place, it should be extremely careful about user data protection.