Customer marketing and retention specialist Optimove has announced that it has raised $20 million from Israel Growth Partners, a Tel-Aviv based private equity investment firm that focuses on later stage investments. The growth-financing round marks the first outside funding for the nearly eight-year-old Optimove, and it follows three straight years of 100% year-over-year growth for the company.
Moshe Lichtman, IGP
As part of the financing, Israel Growth Partners (IGP) co-founder Moshe Lichtman will join Optimove’s board of directors. IGP is a Private Equity investment firm founded by Lichtman and Haim Shani, two of Israel’s most experienced global tech leaders. IGP is backed by leading financial institutions including banks, insurance companies and pension funds. Lichtman is also on the board of directors of website analysis company SimilarWeb, in which he was a Series B round investor.
Optimove’s Customer Marketing Cloud provides customer-centric brands with a data-driven marketing platform that increases retention, engagement and customer spend by delivering personalized campaigns across multiple channels. The Optimove Customer Marketing Cloud offers proprietary predictive customer modelling, real-time hypertargeting, multi-channel campaign orchestration and self-optimizing personalization to help clients maximize the value of each and every customer.
Via the Optimove Customer Marketing Cloud, more than 4 billion targeted, personalized messages are sent to over 900 million customers every year through email, Facebook, Google Ads, SMS, push notifications, and other channels. Optimove currently employs more than 100 people in offices in New York, London and Tel Aviv.
Optimove is well known in the Retail Forex world, an industry in which it had early success – not surprising, given Forex brokers’ heavy and targeted online marketing spend plus the importance given to customer retention, two areas in which Optimove specializes.
However Optimove has grown up from the online Forex and gaming industries, and most of its growth and future opportunity lies in working with some of the world’s leading online consumer brands. Current Optimove clients include companies such as 1800flowers.com, Zynga, and eBags. Optimove founder and CEO Pini Yakuel recently relocated from Israel to New York, to be closer to where the big potential clients are based. last year.
The funds raised will be used to further invest and grow Optimove’s R&D and maintain its position at the forefront of innovation. Optimove will also invest in growing its sales and marketing organization, and to hire aggressively in the US market, especially for the company’s recently opened New York office.
Pini Yakuel, Optimove CEO
Optimove CEO Pini Yakuel had the following to say about the fundraising:
Our mission is to empower customer-centric brands to conduct smarter, emotionally intelligent marketing campaigns. 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. I have no doubt they will help in making Optimove the fastest growing company and an innovation leader in its space.