The Venture Codex Logo

The Venture Codex

Airship

1225 W Burnside St, Suite 401, Portland, OR, 97209, United States

Overview

Urban Airship began as a push-notification platform and has expanded to support email, SMS, mobile wallets and voice assistants, positioning itself as the platform to manage messaging and unify customer data across channels. Recent product additions include voice notifications on Amazon Alexa (in beta) and automated in-app messaging. The company has signed new enterprise customers including AMC, Magazine Luiza and Royal Automobile Club. Urban Airship says it has delivered more than two trillion messages, doubling the total from a year ago. CEO Brett Caine, who joined in 2014, said the company is currently breaking even. Management intends to use capital to accelerate global expansion and invest in emerging channels while emphasizing first-party, opt-in data amid growing privacy and regulatory discussion. Urban Airship is a Portland, Oregon-based provider of customer engagement solutions for brands. It offers a mobile relationship management platform that enables brands to build relationships with connected customers by streamlining the creation, delivery and management of targeted cross-platform mobile push messages, in-app messages, rich app pages, Apple Passbook passes and Google Wallet cards. The company closed a $21M Series D, bringing total funding to $67.6M to date. Backers in the round included August Capital, Foundry Group, Franklin Park Associates, QuestMark Partners, True Ventures and Verizon Ventures. Senior hires announced alongside the financing include Erin Hintz as chief marketing officer and Mike Musson as senior vice president of strategy and business development, while Brent Hieggelke moved to chief mobile evangelist. The company is led by CEO and president Brett Caine. Urban Airship offers a Mobile Relationship Management platform that helps brands build relationships with constantly connected customers. Its platform streamlines creation, delivery and management of targeted cross-platform mobile push messages, in-app messages, rich app pages, Apple Passbook passes and Google Wallet cards. Clients include large retail, media & entertainment, sports and travel & hospitality brands. Led by CEO Brett Caine, the company said it will use the new funding to grow globally. The business has raised a total of $58.7M to date. Urban Airship provides a mobile backend-as-a-service with products for push messaging, location-based push, and developer tools such as a PassTools API for Apple Passbook. The company has been expanding its focus beyond the backend to serve brand advertisers and build tools that let brands engage customers on mobile without full native apps. Urban Airship acquired Tello, the maker of a visual Passbook builder, and launched the PassTools API to support that strategy. The additional funding is earmarked to grow the marketing team, pursue international expansion, and grow its core location push-messaging business. Operationally, Urban Airship says it quadrupled push volumes and revenue during 2012 and doubled its staff. The company was on track for profitability as of Q1 2014. Urban Airship provides a back-end platform that lets developers integrate push notifications and in-app communications into mobile apps. The company serves customers including ESPN, LivingSocial, and Gowalla and is facilitating over 1 billion notifications per month to users on 300 million devices. Urban Airship reported API calls increased tenfold after Apple’s iOS 5 launch and said revenue grew 600% in 2011 as developers built its tools into tens of thousands of apps. Portland-based Urban Airship recently acquired SimpleGeo to add location infrastructure and expand its offerings for mobile developers; SimpleGeo’s assets enable more precise location-based targeting. The acquisition expanded the team to 51 and established a presence in the Bay Area. The company has about $26.1 million in total funding following its latest financing.

Total raised
$105M
Funding rounds
7
Latest round
Series F
Latest activity
Jun 2018

Industries

  • A/B Testing
  • Digital Marketing
  • Email Marketing
  • Messaging
  • Mobile Apps
  • SaaS
  • SMS
  • Web Apps
Visit website

Recent funding

  1. Series F

    Jun 2018

    $25M

  2. Series D

    Feb 2015

    $21M

  3. Series D

    Oct 2014

    $12M

  4. Equity

    Feb 2013

    $25M

  5. Series C

    Nov 2011

    $15M

Team