MoEngage, a prominent customer engagement platform empowering consumer brands across 75 countries, has successfully closed a new funding round spearheaded by its existing investor, Goldman Sachs Alternatives. This substantial investment is earmarked to accelerate the company’s global expansion initiatives and deepen the integration of artificial intelligence across its platform, underscoring a strategic push to dominate the evolving landscape of digital customer interaction.

The Series F funding round saw $100 million in shares change hands, with approximately 60% allocated to primary investments for company growth and 40% to secondary transactions. This latest capital infusion also welcomed Indian venture firm A91 Partners as a new investor, signaling growing confidence from diverse financial entities. With this latest round, MoEngage’s total funding to date has reached an impressive $250 million, positioning it strongly for its ambitious future plans.

The Evolving Landscape of Customer Engagement

The modern digital economy has fundamentally reshaped how brands interact with their customers. In an era saturated with information and choice, consumer attention has become a highly coveted commodity. This heightened competition compels businesses to move beyond generic marketing campaigns, demanding sophisticated tools that can deliver hyper-personalized experiences across an ever-increasing array of digital channels. The shift is not merely about reaching customers, but about engaging them meaningfully, fostering loyalty, and driving repeat business through relevant, timely, and individualized communications.

This paradigm shift has fueled the growth of the Customer Engagement Platform (CEP) market, a segment of the broader marketing technology (MarTech) industry. CEPS are designed to unify customer data from various touchpoints – websites, mobile apps, social media, email, offline interactions – and use this consolidated intelligence to orchestrate personalized campaigns. As consumers grow accustomed to tailored experiences from digital giants, their expectations for similar interactions with all brands have skyrocketed. Consequently, companies that fail to adopt advanced engagement strategies risk falling behind, losing market share to more agile, customer-centric competitors.

A Decade of Strategic Growth

Founded 11 years ago, MoEngage embarked on its journey with a focused strategy, primarily serving markets in India and Southeast Asia. This initial phase allowed the company to refine its platform, understand regional nuances, and build a robust foundation for scalability. Over its first seven years, MoEngage cultivated a strong customer base in these regions, establishing itself as a key player in nascent but rapidly expanding digital economies.

However, recognizing the immense global potential for its solutions, the company strategically pivoted towards broader international expansion four years ago. This expansion has yielded significant results, particularly in North America, which now accounts for over 30% of its total revenue. Europe and the Middle East contribute approximately 25%, while India and Southeast Asia collectively still represent a substantial 45% of the business. This diversified revenue stream underscores MoEngage’s successful transition from a regional specialist to a truly global enterprise, capable of adapting its offerings to diverse market demands and regulatory environments.

Goldman Sachs’ continued support, following its co-leadership in MoEngage’s $77 million Series E round in June 2022, serves as a powerful validation of the company’s business model and growth trajectory. Such repeat investments from sophisticated financial institutions like Goldman Sachs typically signal deep confidence in a company’s fundamentals, its leadership team, and its long-term market opportunity. As Raviteja Dodda, co-founder and CEO of MoEngage, remarked in an interview, "The current investors know the most about the company, in terms of how the company performs, and they know everything good and bad. [Goldman Sachs] leading the round is a strong validation of our fundamentals." This sentiment highlights the importance of sustained investor belief in navigating the competitive and often volatile technology startup landscape.

The Power of AI in Personalized Marketing

At the core of MoEngage’s value proposition is its commitment to leveraging artificial intelligence to automate and enhance customer engagement. The company has invested heavily over the past two to three years in developing cutting-edge generative AI and decisioning AI capabilities, which are embodied in its proprietary Merlin AI suite. This suite represents a significant leap forward in empowering marketing and product teams, enabling them to launch campaigns more rapidly and improve targeting efficiency with unprecedented precision.

The Merlin AI suite integrates a range of AI agents designed for specific marketing use cases. For instance, some agents function as sophisticated copywriters, assisting consumer brands in drafting compelling marketing messages, generating multiple variations of a single campaign to test effectiveness, or producing natural language text alongside relevant imagery. This automation significantly reduces the manual effort traditionally required for content creation, allowing marketers to focus on strategy rather than repetitive tasks.

Beyond content generation, the suite also incorporates advanced decisioning AI tools. These tools analyze vast datasets of customer behavior, preferences, and historical interactions to determine the optimal message, the most effective communication channel, and the precise timing for delivering offers or information to individual customers. This level of intelligent automation moves beyond basic segmentation, enabling hyper-personalization at scale – a critical differentiator in today’s crowded digital landscape. The ability to predict customer needs and preferences, and to respond dynamically, allows brands to build deeper, more meaningful relationships, enhancing customer satisfaction and driving conversion rates.

Market Impact and Competitive Edge

MoEngage currently serves an expansive portfolio of over 1,350 consumer brands globally, including internationally recognized names like SoundCloud, McAfee, Kayak, Domino’s, Deutsche Telekom, and Travelodge. Its client roster also features prominent Indian household brands such as Swiggy, Flipkart, Ola, Airtel, and Tata. This diverse client base spans various sectors, with approximately 60% of the company’s business derived from traditional enterprises and the remaining 40% from internet-focused firms. Furthermore, MoEngage has made significant inroads into the financial services sector, working with more than 25 global banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Citibank, as well as major insurers like India’s Life Insurance Corporation (LIC).

A significant testament to MoEngage’s competitive strength is its success in winning over more than 300 customers who previously relied on established marketing platforms from incumbents such as Adobe, Oracle, and Salesforce. This ability to displace entrenched players highlights the agility and advanced capabilities of MoEngage’s platform, particularly its AI-driven features. The company’s expansion in North America and the EMEA regions has been substantially fueled by these competitive wins, demonstrating its capacity to deliver superior value and performance.

A notable example of this impact is SoundCloud’s migration of over 120 million users to MoEngage within just 12 weeks. According to Hope Barrett, Senior Director of MarTech at SoundCloud, the move leveraged AI-driven insights to accelerate product launches and significantly enhance retention among its paid user base. This case illustrates how MoEngage’s platform can not only streamline operations but also directly contribute to key business metrics like user retention and product adoption.

Moreover, many of MoEngage’s customers previously relied on a fragmented ecosystem of multiple point solutions to handle specific marketing tasks. By consolidating these disparate tools into a unified platform, MoEngage helps brands reduce operational costs, streamline marketing workflows, and gain a holistic view of their customer data. As Dodda explained, "If you look at all of our brands, whether it’s a bank or an e-commerce company, they leverage MoEngage to unify all their customer data from all the touchpoints. It could be their offline stores, website, mobile app [or other channels]." This unified data approach is crucial for creating consistent, personalized customer journeys across an increasingly complex multi-channel environment.

Global Expansion and Future Outlook

MoEngage’s impressive growth trajectory is set to continue. The company reported approximately 40% year-over-year growth last year and aims to maintain a robust 35% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the next three years. Financially, the company is also targeting to become adjusted EBITDA-positive on a quarterly basis by the end of the current fiscal year, indicating a strong focus on profitability alongside aggressive expansion.

The competitive landscape for MoEngage includes other agile customer engagement platforms like Braze and CleverTap, as well as the legacy marketing clouds offered by industry giants such as Adobe, Oracle, and Salesforce. However, MoEngage believes its deep focus on AI-driven insights and a unified platform approach gives it a distinct advantage.

With approximately 800 employees across 15 offices worldwide, MoEngage is poised for further workforce expansion. The company plans to significantly scale its customer success, support, sales, and marketing teams, particularly in North America and Europe, to solidify its presence in these critical markets. Concurrently, it will continue to invest heavily in research and development, building out additional AI capabilities and recruiting top talent to support these innovations.

Looking ahead, MoEngage harbors ambitions of an initial public offering (IPO) within the next couple of years. While a specific timeline remains undisclosed, this aspiration underscores the company’s confidence in its long-term potential and its strategic goal to become a major public entity in the MarTech space. "We see an opportunity to build a multi-billion dollar revenue company in our space," Dodda affirmed, reflecting the company’s expansive vision and its determination to capitalize on the sustained demand for intelligent customer engagement solutions. The successful Series F round, led by a heavyweight like Goldman Sachs, provides the crucial capital and validation needed to propel MoEngage towards these ambitious objectives, shaping the future of how brands connect with their customers globally.