Optimove raises $20 million for mobile marketing retention campaigns

Mobile marketing retention company Optimove has raised $20 million to help businesses keep the customers they already have by targeting them with special messages.

The company raised the money from Israel Growth Partners, a private equity investment firm that focuses on late-stage investments. It is the first funding round for the eight-year-old Optimove, after three years of 100-percent year-over-year growth. Optimove will use the money to expand its business of using targeted marketing and data analysis to help mobile app creators retain customers and raise revenues.

Above: Pini Yakuel, CEO of Optimove.

Image Credit: Optimove

The current growth round comes on the heels of stable expansion for Optimove and is aimed at propelling the market leader into extreme growth.

Optimove counts more than 200 companies as customers, including 1-800-Flowers, Zynga, and eBags. The company’s Customer Marketing Cloud currently sends more than 4 billion targeted, personalized messages to over 900 million people every year through email, Facebook, Google Ads, text messages, push notifications, and other channels.

Optimove has 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.

Optimove will hire aggressively in the U.S., 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, in a statement. “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’ Lichtman will join Optimove’s board.

“Optimove is incredibly well-positioned to succeed as the leading customer marketing platform,” said Lichtman, in a statement. “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.”