Optimove Acquires Kumulos to Expand Personalised Mobile Capabilities of Its Multichannel CRM Marketing Platform

Optimove, the CRM Marketing Platform, today announced its acquisition of Kumulos, a Dundee, Scotland-based provider of a personalised messaging platform for mobile applications. The acquisition furthers Optimove’s efforts to expand the native messaging capabilities of its Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Marketing platform, which empowers brands to connect with existing customers and deliver personalised multichannel journeys, at scale.

Optimove helps data-rich brands across industries manage large-scale CRM marketing frameworks. By personalising thousands of campaigns to hundreds of segments, Optimove allows brands to reach their customers with the right message on the right channel. Unlike other technologies that rely on common, rule-based orchestration, Optimove’s AI-driven solutions autonomously determine the next-best-action for each individual customer, eliminating the need for marketers to manually map every customer journey.

With a Customer Data Platform (CDP) at its core, Optimove offers marketing teams direct access to their customer data to build, test, and optimise hundreds of CRM campaigns weekly. The Kumulos acquisition bolsters Optimove’s AI engine, adding native mobile capabilities to allow brands to seamlessly orchestrate multichannel marketing journeys across web, email, and mobile channels.

“Our accelerated growth has been driven by building the most powerful orchestration ‘brain’ in the market on top of our CDP,” said Optimove Founder and CEO, Pini Yakuel. “To support our next stage of growth, we will continue to add expanded capabilities to help marketers reach customers in many different ways. We already do this in email and Kumulos was a natural fit to offer this across mobile marketing as they provide an easy way to build out sophisticated mobile and web campaigns.”

With the Kumulos acquisition, Optimove now empowers marketers to:

• Re-engage customers with mobile push notifications that support rich media, templates, and deep linking, which are delivered based on each customer’s usage history.
• Create customised in-app messages with on-brand overlays and inbox messages for onboarding experiences, customer-based messaging, and rich in-app communications that provide the ultimate personalised experience to every customer.
• Maximise opt-ins and conversions with fully customisable permission overlays and soft prompts as well as personalised rich media web push messages that dynamically adapt to each customer’s on-site behavior.
• Trigger higher-accuracy automated messages leveraging geofences and beacon technology combined with realtime behavior, customer attributes, and preferences.
• Acquire new mobile app users from websites, emails, social media, digital advertising, out-of-home advertising, and more with award winning deferred deep linking powered by universal smart links and web-to-app banners that intelligently navigate each customer to a unique destination.

“We were already partnered with Optimove and share an open, collaborative culture, so integrating our technology into its UI as a fully native solution was seamless,” said Bob Lawson, co-founder of Kumulos, who will assume the role of Director of Mobile Offering at Optimove. “Kumulos brings a unique blend of mobile messaging and engagement features to enable personalised mobile-first experiences for brands. Customers will be able to build these mobile campaigns and journeys directly from within Optimove from day one.”

Kumulos co-founder Mark Petrie will also join Optimove, serving as the Director of Engineering for Mobile Services.

Today, Optimove’s CRM Marketing platform sends more than 81 billion optimised messages every year, helping brands grow their customer lifetime value by more than 33 percent. The company serves more than 500 brands – including Dollar Shave Club, Entain, BetMGM, Staples, JD Sports, Papa John’s, Pennsylvania Lottery, Family Dollar and others across sports, gaming, retail, telecommunications, and financial services. Kumulos’ customer base deepens Optimove’s penetration in retail and finance and extends its reach into other key verticals such as quick service restaurants (Subway, Pizza Pizza), logistics (CargoLux, UPS), travel and hospitality (Sandals and Beaches, Network Rail) and healthcare (Sanofi, Roche, Ellerca Health).

Over the past six months, Optimove has raised $75 million in funding to accelerate its platform development through M&A and strategic hiring, already increasing its workforce to 340 employees. On the heels of the acquisition, Optimove is set to invest in Scotland locations as an R&D center to complement the development locations currently in Tel Aviv and Ukraine. The team will leverage existing SDKs for all leading operating systems, including iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter, Cordova/Ionic, Unity, and Xamarin to bring differentiated mobile marketing solutions to market.

The Kumulos acquisition closed in March 2022. Optimove plans to continue its product enhancement through additional value-add technology acquisitions this year.