Photo Credit: Husnu Atilla from Pixabay

The Customer Engagement Solutions market was estimated to grow at 10% CAGR from $12.56 billion in 2021 to $21.95 billion driven by the increasing adoption of AI and machine learning, rapid deployment of IoT and connected infrastructure solutions. New York-based Braze (Nasdaq: BRZE), a leading player in this market, went public last month.

Braze’s Offerings

Braze was founded in 2011 by Bill Magnuson, Jon Hyman, and Mark Ghermezian because they believed that the adoption of mobile technologies would drive tremendous change in both business and society. They envisioned that mobile technologies would create two major events – new businesses would be born and built to be mobile-first and that older companies would be driven by changing consumer behavior to transform the way they delivered products and services. They wanted to build a company that would leverage this new technology to help the world’s companies grow their customer engagement.

Today, Braze is a comprehensive customer engagement platform that creates relevant and memorable experiences between consumers and brands. Braze uses context to understand every customer interaction, thus helping brands to foster human connection with consumers through interactive conversations on all channels. Its platform empowers brands to listen to their customers better, understand them more deeply and act on that understanding. Brands can ingest and process customer data in real time, optimize contextually relevant, cross-channel marketing campaigns and continuously evolve their customer engagement strategies.

Braze is also following a PaaS strategy by allowing brands to integrate its platform with their own in-house technical infrastructure. Additionally, it is also expanding a partner ecosystem on best-in-class technologies. Using its application programming interfaces (API), customers have the ability to import data from other systems into any layer of Braze’s technology stack. It also supports direct integrations with cloud data service providers, customer data management platforms, and analytic solutions such as Snowflake, Segment, and Amplitude.

Recently, Braze also announced integrations of its product Braze Currents with Amazon EventBridge to facilitate the building of event-driven applications at scale. It also announced Braze Alloys’ partnership with Appsflyer, RudderStack, and TreasureData to expand Currents integrations. The integrations will allow brands to receive a more unified view of their customers as well as more granular analytics to understand the impact of their customer engagement strategies, creating a continuous bi-directional data loop throughout a brand’s marketing technology stack.

As of July 2021, Braze had over 1,000 customers globally on its platform. Its platform has enabled interactions with 3.3 billion monthly active users through its customers’ apps, websites, and other digital interfaces in July 2021. That metric stood at 2.3 billion in January 2020 and 1.6 billion in January 2019. In fiscal year 2021, it has processed over 7 trillion consumer-generated data points on its platform, and its customers have sent about 1 trillion messages to their consumers using its platform.

Braze faces intense competition from legacy marketing clouds like Adobe and Salesforce and point solutions like Airship, Iterable, Leanplum, MailChimp, and MoEngage.

Braze’s Financials

Braze’s platform has helped deliver high revenue growth. Its revenue in 2021 grew 58% to $150.2 million from $96.4 million in 2020. Net loss was $32 million for the last two fiscals. For the six months ended June 30 this year, its revenues grew 53.25% to $103.6 million, and net loss was $25.8 million.

Braze went public in November this year. Before going public, it had raised $175.1 million in ten rounds of funding from investors including Spark Capital, Cross Creek, Meritech Capital Partners, Blumberg Capital, Citi Ventures, Rally Ventures, ICONIQ Capital, InterWest Partners, and Ridge Ventures. Its most recent round was held in July 2020 for $80 million.

Its list price was $65 and was valued at $5.9 billion. It is currently trading at $62.22 with a market capitalization of $5.62 billion.