This startup safeguards your inbox from spam emails and push notifications

Bringing behavioural analytics, real-time segmentation, multi-channel messaging, A/B testing, and personalisation on one unified platform, CleverTap enables companies to segment users and uncover key insights in order to drive engagement effectively.

Spamming users with unnecessary notifications and emails cannot be considered an effective way of engaging with them, and this is where analytics becomes so important. With two decades of experience in software architecture, Anand Jain (40) observed the dearth of strategic app marketing given the growing number of apps.

Anand, along with friends Sunil Thomas and Suresh Kondamudi, wanted to explore the concept of increasing campaign effectiveness based on the data of users’ behavioural approach towards web browsing. Accordingly, in 2013, the trio founded CleverTap with the goal of making mobile app engagement relevant, contextual, and personal.

Backed by Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital, CleverTap helps figure out app and website usage patterns, allowing marketers to engage with their customers more personally. The technology is tailored for large companies (which may have millions of users) as well as startups.

Mumbai- and California-based CleverTap offers behavioural analytics, real-time segmentation, multi-channel messaging, A/B testing, and personalisation on one unified platform. It enables companies to segment users and uncover key insights in order to drive engagement effectively. For example, the past behaviour segment allows one to identify the activities of the users in the past 30 days and the live user segment allows one to add a user if the behaviour matches pre-defined criteria.

“We have raised $8 million from Sequoia Capital India and Accel Partners in Series A funding. We've utilised our funding from Series A to set up a presence in the US, strengthen our engineering and data-science teams, and spend on marketing,” says Anand.

He further added that today, thousands of marketers, agencies, and developers worldwide use CleverTap to get deep user insights, personalise app experiences, and improve user loyalty.

A commerce graduate from Gujarat University, Anand was the former CTO of burrp.com, the local reviews and recommendations platform. In 2009, burrp.com was acquired by the publicly traded yellow pages company, Infomedia 18 Ltd (now merged with Network 18). Before that, Anand was in Seattle and San Francisco, where he has worked with Motorola, AT&T, and Brience.

The beginnings

CleverTap managed to raise $1.6 million from Accel Partners as seed capital during the first year of operations.

BookMyShow was CleverTap’s first client. Recalling the experience, Anand says Ashish Hemrajani called him to run through an idea about sending targeted emails. He told Ashish that the team at CleverTap was about to build a comprehensive solution that would offer analytics, segmentation, and various options to engage users. When Ashish expressed interest and wanted to know more about it, Anand showed him some HTML mockups he had created. Impressed by same, Ashish signed the deal in no time.

CleverTap is a SaaS platform and caters to businesses across verticals like like e-commerce, gaming, foodtech, event and ticketing, travel, media, and content.

Apart from BookMyShow, Indian customers include names like Craftsvilla, Voonik, iIxigo, Zoomcar, Club Mahindra, Faasos, BillBachao, Via.com, Times Now, ZeeTV, and India TV, while the list of global customers includes DealsPlus, Totspot, Disqus, InstantTV, MTV, Arabsat, TopFan, Shuggr, LoseIt, CastOff, SeenStream, and History TV.

“CleverTap offers an advanced mobile CRM technology which lets us implement automated scenarios for our Android, iOS, and Windows app users. Using CleverTap, we have increased our conversion rate by 50 percent in the last several months,” says Marzdi Kalianiwala, VP, BookMyShow.

The CleverTap team is spread across Sunnyvale, Los Angeles and New York in the US, and Mumbai in India, with plans to expand offerings to Latin America, Spain, and the Middle East. At present, the startup has 27 employees in India and 11 in the US.

“Startups can sign up with us for free, and send in up to 10 million events a month and go for a custom event volume plan which starts at $1,500 per month. Events are actions performed by users on mobile apps. For enterprises — we sign them on a custom pricing plan, which can run into $10,000–$35,000 a month,” says Anand.

Serving customers effectively

 According to a Markets and Markets report, the customer experience management market will be worth $10.77 billion by 2020. The report further stated that enterprise spending on customer experience management (CEM) solutions has increased significantly in the wake of increasing usage of digital channels (smartphones and tablets) by consumers in sharing experiences.

WebEngage is one of the startups leveraging omnichannel customer engagements, offering a multichannel user engagement platform that tracks all users (across website and apps) to let the client send targeted messages across channels. MoEngage enables mobile app companies to deliver personalised interactions through push notifications, in-app recommendations, email campaigns and other retargeting channels.

Gurgaon-based Horntell is building a unified platform that allows users to use any app/website through one single feed containing small actionable notifications. Delhi-based iZooto is a data-enabled platform that allows marketers to send app-customised push notifications to subscribers through the mobile, tablet, and desktop platforms.

Website: Clevertap