MessageGears Receives $62 Million
MessageGears, the provider of a customer engagement platform for consumer brands, recently completed a $62 million growth financing round led by Long Ridge Equity Partners, with participation from Argentum Group and Atlanta Ventures. The company has now raised $80 million since its founding in 2011.
The MessageGears platform enables enterprise marketers to leverage zero- and first-party data to engage with customers in highly personalized ways across email, SMS, and other channels. By directly accessing the data repositories of brands 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 the new funds, MessageGears will work to strengthen its technology platform, expand its global footprint, and explore acquisitions that align with the company’s vision for the future.
15Five Gets Strategic Investment from ServiceNow
15Five, the employee communications company headquartered in San Francisco, has obtained a strategic investment of an undisclosed amount from ServiceNow, the cloud computing firm that helps companies manage digital workflows for enterprise operations, adding to the $52 million that 15Five had raised in a Series C round in July.
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The funding will accelerate 15Five’s ongoing product development, spanning its holistic performance management software platform and integrated manager training and coaching, aimed at helping human resources (HR) leaders drive higher performance, productivity, engagement, and retention of employees.
A recent product release from 15Five enables a company to more easily identify and segment employees with the potential to make a big impact on the organization. HR teams can then monitor engagement trends among such employees, quickly react to changes in sentiment, and proactively take action to retain talent.
Another recent product release enhances performance review calibration, allowing HR leaders to visualize the distribution of review ratings across different managers and adjust ratings in real time. The enhancements and collaboration capabilities help maintain a fair and transparent calibration process regardless of the scale of an organization.
Darwin CX Announces $38.4 Million Funding
Darwin CX (DCX) announced it had raised $38.4 million in funding co-led by Toronto-based First Ascent Ventures and California-headquartered Felicitas Global Partners, with additional funding provided by Metropolitan Partners Group of New York.
A software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, DCX leverages real-time data to increase customer acquisition and retention rates while reducing marketing spend for publishers and membership-based organizations. It also enables data-driven transformations for brands that often have sophisticated requirements for customer acquisition and retention, reporting, and customer service. The company has scaled clients by a factor of 10 in the past 18 months, adding new customers and channel partners across North America.
The funding will accelerate the DCX mission to serve clients with tools and capabilities aimed at growing client subscriber bases and save up to half of their fulfilment and marketing costs. DCX will also use the fresh capital infusion to scale operations, build strategic channel partnerships, and continue investing in its ambitious product roadmap.
Chattermill Secures $26 Million in Series B Round
Unified customer intelligence provider Chattermill recently raised $26 million in a Series B funding round to double down on its growth, expanding its capabilities to analyze interactions numbering in the millions between a company and its customers, ranging from feedback data to social media. The funding round was led by Beringea, with participation from previous investors DN Capital, Ventech, Runa Capital, btov Partners, and SVB, as well as new investors Blossom Street Ventures.
Chattermill enables businesses to unify their CX data, and it uses deep learning-based AI to generate insights to help companies deliver loyalty and growth-driving CX. Chattermill works with leading brands, including Amazon, Uber, H&M, and Zappos, to power their CX programs. Since raising $8 million in Series A in 2020, Chattermill has more than doubled its team and hit 200% of its new business revenue and pipeline targets in the first quarter this year.
London-based Chattermill will use the new funding to support its continued organic expansion in the US and Europe, as well as its growing partner network throughout the world. The company is hiring across its engineering, data, and commercial functions.
LumApps Acquires Vizir to Advance Conversational AI Development Strategy
LumApps, the employee experience (EX) platform provider, has acquired Vizir, a no-code digital assistant technology for automating mundane tasks and improving employee access to knowledge, resources, and third-party applications at lower costs.
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Powered by Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Vizir’s advanced digital assistant simulates human dialog to make EX more humanlike and personal. Vizir also brings micro-apps that enable use of the digital assistant across various channels, such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, or Google Chat. Additionally, Vizir’s no-code tools and embedded libraries enable company IT and HR departments to set up chatbots.
Digital assistants represent valuable technology that can be used to provide seamless access to key knowledge and other resources. For LumApps, the acquisition will give customers a chance to integrate intelligent bot software into their own EX platform to meet the needs of today’s workforce.
Author Information
Alex is responsible for writing about trends and changes that are impacting the customer experience market. He had served as Principal Editor at Village Intelligence, a Los Angeles-based consultancy on technology impacting healthcare and healthcare-related industries. Alex was also Associate Director for Content Management at Omdia and Informa Tech, where he produced white papers, executive summaries, market insights, blogs, and other key content assets. His areas of coverage spanned the sectors grouped under the technology vertical, including semiconductors, smart technologies, enterprise & IT, media, displays, mobile, power, healthcare, China research, industrial and IoT, automotive, and transformative technologies.
At IHS Markit, he was Managing Editor of the company’s flagship IHS Quarterly, covering aerospace & defense, economics & country risk, chemicals, oil & gas, and other IHS verticals. He was Principal Editor of analyst output at iSuppli Corp. and Managing Editor of Market Watch, a fortnightly newsletter highlighting significant analyst report findings for pitching to the media. He started his career in writing as an Editor-Reporter for The Associated Press.
