India's WebEngage gets $20m Series B

Additional contributions came existing investors India Quotient, Blume Ventures, and Indian Angel Network (IAN), as well as from several family offices. They included Unmaj Corporation, NB Ventures, and vehicles linked to BharatPe co-founder Shashwat Nakrani and TVS Capital’s Gopal Srinivasan.

WebEngage was founded in 2011 and received seed funding from IAN shortly thereafter, according to AVCJ Research. Intermittent equity and debt funding rounds over the next nine years involved GTI Capital Group, Blume, BlackSoil Capital, and Social Capital. A Series A of USD 4m closed in 2020 with commitments from India Quotient, BlackSoil, and IAN.

The company describes itself as a full-stack retention operating system for consumer-facing businesses. It serves more than 600 customers globally across India, the Middle East, Latin America, Europe, and Southeast Asia. It works with the likes of Unilever, Ikea, and L’Oreal, as well as domestic technology players such as Myntra, Groww, Unacademy, Acko, and Spinny.

WebEngage reaches out to customers through email and SMS marketing campaigns, WhatsApp engagement, Facebook and Google retargeting, and web and mobile push notifications. This is supported by a unified data platform that builds customer profiles – and enables engagement to be more personalised – as well as product and revenue analytics.

“No business should ever have to work hard to retain their customers. User retention has to be smart, data-driven, fully automated and hyper-personalised at human scale,” Avlesh Singh, co-founder and CEO of WebEngage (pictured, right, with co-founder Ankit Utreja), said in a blog post. “We are trying to solve this problem for mid-sized and large consumer businesses across the globe.”

Anand Lunia, a founding partner at India Quotient, added that WebEngage demonstrates how software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies can replicate their success in India on a global scale.

Apurva Patel, a managing partner at Singularity, emphasised the company’s ability to deliver customer insights through smart segmentation and personalised messaging. “What fascinated us about Avlesh and his team is their ability to gain traction with not only digital businesses, but also with large traditional enterprises,” he said.

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• Topics
• Early-stage
• South Asia
• Technology
• India