BRAZE

Bill Magnuson, Jon Hyman, and Mark Ghermezian met through a mobile gaming network called Appboy that they launched in 2011. The original concept was a social layer for mobile games.

It did not get traction.

What they noticed while building it was a bigger problem: mobile app developers had no good tools to communicate with their users. Email systems were built for the web era.

The few push notification tools available were clunky and not personalized. Developers were flying blind about what users were actually doing inside their apps.

They pivoted to build Appboy as a mobile-first customer engagement platform. The core insight was that communication with a customer should be tied to their actual behavior — not just who they are, but what they just did, what they skipped, how often they open the app, and when they are most likely to convert.

By 2017, the mobile-first framing had become limiting. The company handled email, SMS, in-app messages, push notifications, and more — so they rebranded to Braze.

Revenue grew from $100M ARR in 2019 to over $200M by 2021.

Enterprise SaaS with annual contracts priced based on the number of monthly active users (MAUs) a customer engages through the platform. The more users a brand communicates with through Braze, the more they pay.

Add-on modules for Braze Canvas (customer journey builder), Braze Currents (data streaming), and AI-powered personalization features add revenue on top of the base contract.

Braze Platform: the core customer engagement system that orchestrates communication across push, email, SMS, in-app, and web channels. Used by brands including Dominos, HBO Max, Headspace, and Grammarly.

Braze Canvas: a visual customer journey builder that lets marketers design multi-step, cross-channel campaigns triggered by user behavior.

Braze Currents: real-time data streaming that sends Braze event data to third-party analytics, data warehousing, and BI tools.

Braze AI: predictive suite that uses machine learning to optimize send times, personalize content, and identify users likely to churn.

Enterprise-focused sales with a land-and-expand motion. Braze wins an initial contract with one team or one channel, then expands as the customer sees results and wants to add SMS, email, or in-app messaging to their push notification setup.

The platform is sticky: once a brand's entire customer communication strategy runs through Braze, switching costs are enormous.

Geographic expansion has been a major growth lever. Braze opened offices in London, Singapore, and Tokyo to serve international enterprise clients.

International revenue now represents a significant portion of total ARR.

Competition from Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Adobe Experience Cloud, both of which have existing enterprise relationships and can bundle Braze's functionality into broader deals. Braze competes on product quality and speed — it is generally considered easier to use and faster to implement — but larger enterprises sometimes default to incumbent vendors even when the product is worse.

Pre-IPO backers included Battery Ventures, Emergence Capital, ICONIQ Capital, Tiger Global Management, and Openview Venture Partners. The company raised a $150M Series E in 2021 at a $1.5 billion valuation before going public later that year.