Urban Airship has delivered 20B push notifications, doubling in just 4 months (exclusive)

Mobile marketing and messaging leader Urban Airship has served more than 20 billion push notifications through iOS, Android, and other platforms, the company revealed today.

Urban Airship currently is helping more than 65,000 companies — including ESPN, Groupon, and other big names — with app notifications, a challenging but ultimately rewarding aspect to apps. You don’t want to annoy your customers with constant pop-ups, but there’s an incredible opportunity to having your brand appear on people’s home screens often. For instance, adding notifications from Urban Airship helped data-compression utility Onavo increase awareness by 75 percent and boost customer satisfaction 50 percent.

Now the company has enabled 20 billion push notifications, a new milestone that it reached on Sunday. That’s according to chief marketing officer Brent Hieggelke, who I met with today at the CTIA Wireless conference in New Orleans. Hieggelke said the milestone was a surprise because the company took two and a half years to reach 10 billion notifications, a milestone it hit in January. Then, just four months later, Urban Airship doubled that number.

“Every month we set new records for growth,” Hieggelke told me. “But we were all surprised by the shape of that curve.”

The company has been spotlighted by both the tech press and the mobile industry for enabling a powerful new level of marketing. Just today, the company won first place at CTIA’s Emerging Technology Awards in the Mobile Marketing & Advertising category.

Next up on the company’s agenda is sign more customers and educate marketers with its “Good Push” campaign. “We want to explain to people how to maximize the value of notifications,” Hieggelke said.

Portland, Ore.-based Urban Airship has raised $21.6 million to date, with backers including Salesforce, Verizon Wireless, Foundry Group, and True Ventures. Its last round in November totaled $15.1 million.

Photo illustration: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat
Airship photo: ER_09/Shutterstock
Arrow image: Umberto Shtanzman/Shutterstock