MessageGears, the leading customer engagement platform for big consumer brands, today announced the completion of a $62 million growth financing round. The round was led by Long Ridge Equity Partners with participation from Argentum Group and Atlanta Ventures. MessageGears has now raised $80 million since its founding in 2011.
MessageGears’ platform enables enterprise marketers to leverage zero- and first-party data to engage with their customers in highly personalized ways across email, SMS, and other channels. By directly accessing brands’ data repositories 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 this unique approach, MessageGears has helped brands such as Expedia, OpenTable, T-Mobile, Rakuten, Indeed, and Party City to unlock the full potential of their data in their customer engagement programs.
MessageGears will use the funds to accelerate innovation of its technology platform, with an emphasis on bolstering its mobile channel capabilities, expanding its global presence, and opportunistically exploring acquisitions that align with its vision for the future.
Alongside the investment, Angad Singh of Long Ridge has joined MessageGears’ Board of Directors.
“At Long Ridge, we’ve long understood that enterprise brands have immense amounts of data about their customers. The challenge has been accessing the data within their marketing tech stack,” said Singh. “Given our thesis on the space, we were incredibly excited by MessageGears’ unique, warehouse-native approach to data. It allows enterprise brands to operate with complete data security and flexibility while delivering real-time, highly-personalized experiences to their customers.”
Forrester recently named MessageGears a Strong Performer and said,“Big, data-and-security-savvy companies who don’t want to port their data into a vendor managed system will find MessageGears a bull’s-eye.”
“This is an exciting time for marketers. Over the next few years, we are going to see a continuing wave of enterprise B2C brands investing in moving their first-party customer data to a modern data warehouse like Snowflake and AWS,” said Roger Barnette, CEO of MessageGears. “MessageGears is the only platform that can help those marketers capitalize on that investment and fully use their data in their customer engagement programs. This funding will help us bring our vision and platform to benefit more global brands.”
About MessageGears
MessageGears is the only data-connected customer engagement platform built for today’s enterprise. MessageGears is a radically different enterprise software company, delivering advanced customer segmentation and message personalization and delivery that simply outperforms other enterprise marketing clouds and data platforms. Through direct data access and innovative platform capabilities, marketers can deliver compelling customer experiences at massive scale, faster and more flexibly than ever before. MessageGears has transformed what marketers thought was possible at major brands like Expedia, Rakuten, T-Mobile, and Chick-fil-A. Learn more at messagegears.com.
About Long Ridge
Founded in 2007, Long Ridge Equity Partners is a private investment firm focused on the financial and business technology sectors. Leveraging deep sector knowledge and an extensive network of industry resources, Long Ridge serves as a value-added partner to high-growth businesses. Since its founding, Long Ridge’s principals have sponsored some of the most successful growth companies in the financial and business technology sectors, providing leading management teams with partnership, strategic resources, and capital to drive profitable expansion. Long Ridge manages over $1 billion of committed capital. For more information on Long Ridge Equity Partners, please visit http://www.long-ridge.com.
About Argentum
Argentum is a New York-based growth equity firm that helps scale bootstrapped 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 over 90 companies, supported more than 200 add-on acquisitions, and been recognized on Inc.’s list of Founder-Friendly Investors for multiple years. 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.
