Argentum Leads $12M Investment in MessageGears

NEW YORK, NY, June 9, 2020 – Argentum, a New York-based growth equity firm, announced today that it closed a $12M investment in MessageGears, the leading provider of customer marketing solutions for the world’s largest brands. The financing was comprised of growth equity capital provided by Argentum and venture debt provided by BridgeBank. In connection with the financing, Walter H. Barandiarán, Managing Partner at Argentum, has joined MessageGears’ Board of Directors.

MessageGears represents the first investment by Argentum’s new fund, Argentum Capital Partners IV, L.P. (“ACP IV”). ACP IV is continuing the successful investment strategy executed by Argentum’s three prior funds – providing growth capital to bootstrap entrepreneurs and supporting buy-and-build investment strategies for rapidly growing B2B software, technology-enabled and business services companies at the smaller end of the middle market. ACP IV is actively seeking new investment opportunities.

MessageGears’ unique Customer Marketing Platform enables the world’s largest enterprise brands to leverage all of their customer data in real time to deliver hyper-personalized messaging across various marketing channels, at scale. Its platform removes common data access challenges for enterprise brands such as Expedia, Rakuten Rewards, Chick-fil-A, T-Mobile and OpenTable by employing an innovative architecture that allows brands to securely and effortlessly use their data as it is with minimal IT involvement.

MessageGears’ solution leapfrogs the competition by being the only customer marketing platform available that connects directly to modern data warehouses like Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift and Microsoft Azure. This removes a critical barrier that currently exists for enterprise marketers.

“This funding will help us continue to revolutionize the customer marketing landscape for enterprise brands”, said Roger Barnette, MessageGears’ CEO. “Our technology enables brands to develop deeper relationships with millions of customers, and we’re proud and excited to work with Argentum to continue to disrupt this industry.”

MessageGears has also recently launched new products Segment and Engage to round out its platform and make it easier for marketing teams to create dynamic audience segments and real-time “moments-based” campaigns without I.T. assistance. The company will utilize the new funds to expand resources in engineering, customer support, sales, and marketing.

“The hidden costs of data friction, including out-of-sync data, time-consuming data management, and maintaining data security and privacy, continue to hobble the marketing industry, creating challenges for marketers to seamlessly personalize messages at scale,” said Walter Barandiarán. “MessageGear’s unique architecture, with a direct data access layer to enterprises’ modern cloud data warehouses, solves critical challenges for large brands that need to communicate effectively with their customers. We are thrilled to be partnering with MessageGears to help them scale.”

About MessageGears
MessageGears is the only customer marketing platform exclusively built for today’s large enterprise. Their technology empowers the world’s most demanding marketers to deliver higly personalized messages, faster and more flexibly than legacy ESPs and other marketing cloud solutions. The platform connects directly to brands’ existing data sources, enabling marketers to maximize the value of their customer data in real time without moving data around. Join sophisticated marketers at companies such as Expedia, Rakuten, and Chick-fil-A who rely on MessageGears to deliver personalized cross-channel messages to grow their business. Learn more at www.messagegears.com

About Argentum
Argentum is a New York-based growth equity firm that partners with entrepreneurial owners to build industry-leading B2B software, technology-enabled and business services companies. The firm invests in companies with revenues of $5 million to $25 million, providing capital to accelerate growth, fund acquisitions and / or generate shareholder liquidity. Over its 30-year history, Argentum has invested in 87 companies and supported nearly 200 add-on acquisitions. Argentum fills the growing gap between early stage venture capital investors and later stage growth equity firms by targeting bootstrapped companies seeking $5 million to $15 million of equity capital.