Optimove Raises $20 Million from Israel Growth Partners to Continue Innovating the Customer Marketing Space.
Optimove, a Customer Marketing Cloud company, announced today that it has raised $20 million in growth funding from Israel Growth Partners, a private equity investment firm that focuses on later stage investments. The round marks the first funding for the nearly eight-year-old company, after three straight years of 100% year-over-year growth. The current growth round comes on the heels of stable expansion of Optimove and is aimed to propel the company into extreme growth. Optimove has bootstrapped the way to its present status as market leader in its space, and has never taken VC funding.
Used by more than 200 companies, including 1-800-flowers.com, Zynga, eBags and others, the company’s Customer Marketing Cloud currently sends more than 4 billion targeted, personalized messages to over 900 million customers every year through email, Facebook, Google Ads, SMS, push notifications, and other channels. Optimove currently employs more than 100 employees in offices in New York, London and Tel Aviv.
Israel Growth Partners (IGP) is a Private Equity investment firm founded by Moshe 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. 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.
“Our mission is to empower customer-centric brands to conduct smarter, emotionally intelligent marketing campaigns,” said Pini Yakuel, founder and CEO of Optimove (pictured top left). “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.”
As part of the financing, Israel Growth Partners’ Moshe Lichtman will join Optimove’s board of directors. “Optimove is incredibly well positioned to succeed as the leading customer marketing platform,” said Lichtman, co-founder and general partner of Israel Growth Partners. “Not only have they built an extremely sophisticated technology platform that gets rave reviews from all of its customers, but Pini and his team have been able to turn Optimove into a well-oiled machine that is poised for extreme growth and category leadership. We are proud to help them take that next step.”
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.
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