Los Angeles-based mobile messaging platform Emotive announced Wednesday that it raised $50 million in a new financing round led by CRV. The Series B brings the company’s valuation to a whopping $400 million.
Emotive aims to help e-commerce brands grow their revenue with the use of conversational text messaging. Its platform uses a combination of AI and human assistance to foster conversations via text message that replicate human interactions.
E-commerce platforms like Shopify, Magento and Bigcommerce employ Emotive’s technology in an effort to prevent cart abandonment and promote sales.
“We launched Emotive and created the human-to-human marketing category because we have a vision of a world where brands are able to scale human conversations with every individual customer to power revenue and loyalty,” Brian Zatulove, the company’s co-founder and CEO, said in a statement.
Emotive plans to use the fresh capital to accelerate its go-to-market strategy and expand its core product.
“Other email and text message platforms still deliver a one-to-many experience through the archaic newsletter blast. Consumers simply don’t like receiving impersonal newsletter blasts over their most intimate communication channels: text messaging,” Zatulove continued. “In reality, the only way to accomplish a true one-to-one relationship is by having an emotionally intelligent conversation with that individual, one that actually feels like there’s a real human being on the other end.”
The platform got off the ground two years ago and has since grown exponentially, recently reporting 466 percent year-over-year growth. The company tripled the size of its workforce in 2020 to keep up with demand.
Emotive isn’t ready to slow down the momentum; this year it plans to triple the size of its team once again. The mobile messaging platform aims to add over 200 employees over the next 12 months. Available roles span the company’s engineering, marketing, sales and customer success teams.
The company has raised $58.2 million in financing to date, according to Crunchbase. Existing investors Mucker Capital and TenOneTen Ventures participated in the round along with new investors, Stripes and Vulcan Capital.
