As the demand for personalized marketing grows, AI is becoming a critical tool in enterprises’ technology arsenals. Marketers’ use of AI soared between 2018 and 2020, jumping from 29% in 2018 to 84% in 2020. Marketing automation alone is now employed by 53% of business-to-business organizations today, eConsultancy reports, with 37% planning to implement it in the future.

Because AI is adept at finding patterns in data and automating repetitive work at scale, it can speed up the production of certain types and formats of marketing content. AI can also decide when to distribute that content and which customer segments to target, as well ts predict customer behavior to identify the most promising — or risky — leads.

One of the AI-powered tools that marketers have turned to is MoEngage, a set of cloud-based services designed to boost customer engagement. In a show of investor confidence, MoEngage this week closed a $30 million series D financing round led by Steadview Capital and existing investors, bringing its total capital raised to over $100 million. CEO Raviteja Dodda says that the funding will be put toward supporting MoEngage’s workforce expansion and product development efforts.

AI-powered customer engagement

Founded in 2014 by Raviteja Dodda and Yashwanth Kumar, MoEngage is an customer engagement platform that taps AI to personalize various channels including email, mobile apps, web messaging widgets, and SMS. Dodda previously was a software engineer at Cisco, while Kumar helped to found DelightCircle, a startup focused on developing mobile- and location-based ecommerce products.

MoEngage attempts to automatically analyze and engage customers at multiple different touchpoints, mapping the steps in a customer’s journey and identifying where they might be dropping off. Using the service, companies can create customer lifecycle campaigns with combinations of email, text, and push notifications, leveraging a segmentation engine splits customers into groups based on their preferences, behavior, demographics, interests, transactions, and more.

MoEngage says its platform is currently processing over 1 trillion data points, 50 billion messages, and 1 billion emails per month. Notable clients include McAfee, Nestle, Domino’s, Deutsche Telekom, Travelodge, and Ally Financial.

Competition

The global customer success platforms market is expected to grow from $1 billion in worth in 2020 to $2.5 billion by 2025, according to Markets and Markets. MoEngage competes in it with startups like Involve.ai, which recently raised $16 million to develop an AI-driven customer engagement platform. Another rival is Retain.ai, which offers software aimed at helping enterprises surface customer engagement data.

But from July 2020 to July 2021, MoEngage claims that its customer base and recurring revenue doubled — reflecting increased investments in AI-driven marketing solutions. In a 2018 Everstring survey, 63% of business-to-business marketers said that they’re interested in using AI to identify trends and 71% want to use it for personalization.

“As customers’ digital expectations skyrocket, reaching the right target, at the right time, on the right channel is becoming more and more challenging. Marketers are turning to various data sources and associated technologies to inform or even automate their processes,” Salesforce wrote in its 2021 State of Marketing report. “[The] rapid acceleration of the shift to digital engagement has prompted marketers to reevaluate which channels warrant increased — or decreased — investment.”