Mobile marketing startup Urban Airship today announced a $25 million investment round.
Founded in 2009, the Portland-based company helps big brands like Adidas, Alaska Airlines, Regal Cinemas, Zillow, and others send push notifications on mobile and email. It also now develops products for mobile wallets and voice-enabled notifications.
Previous investors all participated in the Series F round, with Foundry Group leading it. True Ventures, August Capital, Intel Capital, Verizon Ventures, QuestMark Partners and Franklin Park Associates also invested again. Total funding is north of $100 million.
The fresh cash will be used to fuel sales in markets where Urban Airship is seeing strong uptake, such as travel and financial services. The company will also invest to grow its business across the globe, including in Asia and Latin America.
“Our open platform enables businesses to set new standards for customer experience by delivering the right information at the right time to any channel — including channels that haven’t even been invented yet,” Urban Airship CEO Brett Caine, who took over in 2014, said in a statement.
Urban Airship said it is operating at break-even and is growing annual recurring revenue at 2.5X year-over-year. It has now helped deliver more than two trillion messages and doubled both its message volume and customer count since last year. The company has more than 2,000 customers across 120 countries and employs 181 people at five offices worldwide.
“Urban Airship is battle-tested by many of the world’s largest enterprises and now rapid product advancements are bringing its expertise in customer engagement and real-time data to every channel serving today’s modern CMO,” Chris Moody, partner at Foundry Group, said in a statement.
As consumers download more apps and use more devices, the amount of push notifications from various companies can be overwhelming. Urban Airship offers technology that helps personalize those messages. The company also touts its data protection and privacy policies in light of new regulations like GDPR.
The $25 million round is one of the largest for a Portland-area company this year. Vetsource raised $50 million earlier this month; SheerID raised $18 million in January; and Lytics raised $14 million in April.
