Every business spends lots of money to build a product and then for marketing it. You may spend crores or sometimes millions in marketing for acquiring customers. But you know there’s one more step that companies should understand and focus on, which is “retention.” Acquiring customers is hard, but retaining them is way harder. Meaning, once they are onboarded, we need to make them feel like they are at the right place, and we need to understand what they want. It is a very big topic that we need to master.
For example, you built an app, which is like a booking app or some gaming app. Now when customers are onboarded, and after some time, they uninstall the app. Now if we dig deeper to understand why they uninstalled, we may end up with certain conclusions that may not be correct as always. The reasons may be lack of features in the product, not being suitable for the customer, a bad UI/UX experience, or any sort of problem that impacts the retention of the customers. So, this is a big problem that is common amongst all businesses worldwide.
This is where a startup was born in India to solve the issue. The startup we are discussing today is CleverTap. CleverTap was founded in 2013 by three entrepreneurs: Sunil Thomas, Anand Jain, and Suresh Kondamudi. They had seen how businesses struggled to keep users engaged after the initial download. Their vision was simple yet powerful: help companies truly understand their customers and keep them coming back again and again.
Before launching CleverTap, the founders spent months building a strong technology engine that could track millions of user actions in real time. For example, if you abandoned a shopping cart in an e-commerce app, CleverTap’s system could immediately trigger a personalized notification to remind you or even offer a small discount. This kind of instant, data-driven engagement was rare at the time, and it became the foundation of CleverTap’s success.
Today, CleverTap has grown into a global SaaS company that works with thousands of brands in over 100 countries, including big names like Sony, Domino’s, BookMyShow, and Vodafone. The company is still focused on solving the same problem it started with: making sure businesses don’t just get customers but also keep them for life. The company has grown up quickly as the customer base has increased. By 2018 their customer base had grown by more than 50% as they onboarded customers like Lenskart, Truecaller, and others.
Fast forward to 2022, CleverTap had evolved into a global growth partner for digital-first companies. The platform was being trusted by 1,200+ brands spread across 100 countries, seamlessly powering around 10,000 apps across industries from fintech and e-commerce to streaming and on-demand services. By 2024, CleverTap had scaled to an impressive 2,000 customers, placing it with many of the world’s leading SaaS giants.
But how did CleverTap help companies? And what made them scale up this fast? First, let’s understand how it helped and what it offered. CleverTap is an all-in-one customer engagement and retention platform. Most businesses were struggling with high user drop-offs after the first install or sign-up. CleverTap tapped on it by offering a powerful suite of tools that let brands: Segment users in real-time based on behavior, location, lifecycle stage, and preferences. Deliver personalized communication via push notifications, emails, in-app messages, or SMS at exactly the right moment. Predict user behavior with AI/ML models, helping businesses know who is likely to churn, who might make a purchase, and what kind of message would work best.
In simple terms, CleverTap helped companies reduce churn, increase engagement, and drive revenue by turning raw customer data into actionable insights and campaigns. When these all are offered by a company, there is a strong advantage for the brands to partner or work with. CleverTap made marketing smarter. Instead of just sending the same message to everyone, its AI helped brands talk to each customer in a more personal way, like showing the right product at the right time on the right platform.
As today we see the spike in the digital usage and especially mobiles, where people scroll fast and lose attention quickly, this kind of personalization has become a big advantage. That’s why companies in e-commerce, finance, streaming, and even travel started using CleverTap to grow faster and keep customers engaged. This is how it started, helping brands to build their brands, and eventually CleverTap ended up building a brand itself.
Investors also saw potential in this company, and they supported the growth of CleverTap. As a result, the company has raised over $182 million across multiple funding rounds and gotten the backing of major investors such as Accel, Peak XV Ventures, and CDPQ. As of FY24, the company has generated over INR 430 crore in revenue, and it is aiming to earn more in the coming years.
CleverTap’s journey is proof that solving the right problem at the right time can transform a startup into a global leader. From India to the world, CleverTap has shown that when technology meets empathy, it creates impact at scale.
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