MessageGears, the leading customer engagement platform for big consumer brands, announced the completion of a $62 million growth financing round. The round was led by Long Ridge Equity Partners with participation from Argentum Group and Atlanta Ventures. MessageGears has now raised $80 million since its founding in 2011.
MessageGears’ platform enables enterprise marketers to leverage zero- and first-party data to engage with their customers in highly personalized ways across email, SMS, and other channels. By directly accessing brands’ data repositories instead of relying on cloud data syncs, MessageGears eliminates the latency, inflexibility, and other limitations that large organizations face when using other marketing clouds or customer engagement platforms. With this unique approach, MessageGears has helped brands such as Expedia, OpenTable, T-Mobile, Rakuten, Indeed, and Party City to unlock the full potential of their data in their customer engagement programs.
MessageGears will use the funds to accelerate innovation of its technology platform, with an emphasis on bolstering its mobile channel capabilities, expanding its global presence, and opportunistically exploring acquisitions that align with its vision for the future.
Alongside the investment, Angad Singh of Long Ridge has joined MessageGears’ Board of Directors.
“At Long Ridge, we’ve long understood that enterprise brands have immense amounts of data about their customers. The challenge has been accessing the data within their marketing tech stack,” said Singh. “Given our thesis on the space, we were incredibly excited by MessageGears’ unique, warehouse-native approach to data. It allows enterprise brands to operate with complete data security and flexibility while delivering real-time, highly-personalized experiences to their customers.”
Forrester recently named MessageGears a Strong Performer and said “Big, data-and-security-savvy companies who don’t want to port their data into a vendor managed system will find MessageGears a bull’s-eye.”
“This is an exciting time for marketers. Over the next few years, we are going to see a continuing wave of enterprise B2C brands investing in moving their first-party customer data to the Snowflake Data Cloud, AWS, BigQuery, or other modern data warehouses,” said Roger Barnette, CEO of MessageGears. “MessageGears is the only platform that can help those marketers capitalize on that investment and fully use their data in their customer engagement programs. This funding will help us bring our vision and platform to benefit more global brands.”