The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Tech firm growing to satisfy demand
Dundee tech firm Kumulos is expecting to grow its workforce significantly between now and the end of next year.
Chief executive Mark Petrie said the current team of 10 will have to expand to meet a surge in demand. In 2021 alone, revenues at the business are forecast to double.
Kumulos says its mobile app messaging and management platform is trusted by thousands of developers globally.
The firm started as part of Dundee app developer Waracle as a tool to help developers build and launch mobile apps faster.
Mark said: “We always knew it could be so much more. We wanted to give marketers the tools to analyse and understand how the app was being used and then engage each user to keep them using the app for longer.
“We spun Kumulos into a separate company in 2016.
“No other platform offers the range of analytics we can offer such as user behaviour, user experience and even user opinion or makes it as easy to feed all of this data into rich, targeted, personalised message campaigns.”
Asked how Covid-19 has affected his firm, the chief executive said 2020 was a pivotal year for mobile, with the pandemic accelerating the adoption of mobile by two-to-three years.
New business had slowed down for Kumulos initially during the first lockdown, but Mark said it then picked up quickly as both existing and new customers turned to mobile and then his company to solve the challenges they now faced.
“For example, we continue to work with the Association of Tennis Professionals who, while all professional tennis was suspended, increased its usage of our platform, engaging fans with interviews with players and highlight reels from past tournaments.
“Throughout 2020, we also welcomed a number of new national and international customers to the platform, including: the UK’s leading cashback app; Pizza Pizza which has 500 franchises across Canada; a leading Australian financial institution; Asian hotel and casino chain Resorts World; and a global high street sandwich chain. They are all using Kumulos to message, engage and retain their mobile audience.
“Seventy per cent of our revenue is now international.
“With the Kumulos platform, our customers can get the visibility, targeting and messaging capabilities that would normally require several other tools to deliver. Not only is it more cost-effective using Kumulos, it also means they can get up and running faster and is significantly easier to use.
“The past six months in particular have been extremely strong for us. The trends we have seen in 2020 look set to continue – our forward-looking pipeline is strong and we expect revenues will double in 2021.”
The chief executive said that, as the reputation of Kumulos grows, several large marketing automation platforms have approached the firm looking to license its mobile messaging technology for use by their customers on their platforms.
“This is an exciting avenue of growth for us that will lead to our technology being used by even more larger customers around the world and we hope to announce our first partnership very soon.”
Mark added there are some wider changes ahead in the industry as consumer privacy concerns means apps are having to move away from their reliance on third-party tracking data (data they acquire from other sources) and instead use first-party data (events in their own app).
“This is leading to an increased focus on retaining and engaging existing users, rather than acquiring new users,” he said.