A pair of former Uber engineers wants to help consumer businesses improve engagement and retention through a tool that maps and analyzes customer journeys.
Akram Hassan and Shujun Liu are the co-founders of Rengage, a no-code platform that brings together a company’s existing marketing tools to test and launch new customer engagement strategies.
Rengage helps companies track and map customer journeys, which describes the path a customer takes from initial interaction with a website or app to being converted into a paying customer.
The Seattle-area startup, founded this year, emerged from stealth mode on Tuesday with $3.2 million in funding.
Hassan previously worked as vice president of product, design and growth at Netlify and was head of product of Uber’s growth platform. He spent 4 1/2 years at Uber helping to build internal tools that the company used to orchestrate customer journeys.
Hassan decided to tap into this experience by creating a startup to help consumer-facing companies more broadly engage customers. He teamed up with Liu, the company’s CTO, and a former software engineering manager at Uber and senior software development engineer at Microsoft.
Rengage consolidates existing marketing tools onto a single platform. Users can test different marketing plans using existing tools such as Twilio (SMS), SendGrid (email), and Statsig (experimentation). The platform also provides insights and automates parts of the customer journey mapping process.
The startup, still in its minimal viable product phase, has four customers. It plans to target consumer-facing companies such as financial tech and gaming when it rolls out its product to a wider audience. The goal is to have paying customers early next year, Hassan said.
A challenge will be navigating the macroeconomic downturn, as many companies are focusing on cutting costs rather than growth, Hassan said.
Rengage, which employs fewer than 10 people, competes with a number of customer engagement platforms including Braze, Adobe Experience Cloud, Salesforce, CleverTap, and more.
The pre-seed round included participation from Basis Set Ventures and MXV Capital, whose founder and general partner Mark Ghermezian is the former CEO and co-founder of Braze. Uber Alumni Investment Club is also a backer.
