Kahuna offers a communication automation platform powered by big data and modern machine learning, described in the article as the world’s first communication automation platform. The platform enables personalized engagement across web, email, mobile, and social channels to deliver the right message at the right time. Kahuna’s flagship offering has evolved to help businesses augment their ability to connect meaningfully with customers across channels and devices. The company says it is already serving many leading marketers and cites customers including Yelp, The Hearst Corporation, Overstock.com, The Weather Channel, and hundreds of other brands. The Series B funding will be used to further build the platform’s capabilities and accelerate growth in the marketing automation arena driven by mobile-era requirements. Kahuna is headquartered in Silicon Valley, has offices in New York, and was founded in 2012. Kahuna describes itself as a “mobile engagement engine” that builds user profiles to deliver personalized push notifications and marketing automation. Its core product enables testing and automated delivery of messages, including AtoE Testing (five-way testing) to identify the most effective creative and timing. The company says initial customers have seen roughly a 20% response rate to messages. Named customers include Yahoo, QuizUp, 1-800-Flowers, and the New England Patriots. Kahuna launched last fall and had previously raised $2M in seed funding. The team plans to expand beyond push into additional engagement channels and broader marketing automation, and it has an integration with mobile commerce platform Branding Brand to expose those customers to Kahuna’s tools. Kahuna offers an "engagement engine" that analyzes customer behavior on mobile and web to automate push-notification and email marketing based on usage patterns. The product includes more than 50 pre-built engagement campaigns that customers can tweak and A/B test, and the system learns from campaign data over time. Kahuna emphasizes recency and personalization to improve message effectiveness while reducing message volume. The company says push messaging can produce roughly a 5x response rate versus email and that customers often send fewer, more effective messages. After testing with a limited group of beta customers, Kahuna opened to the public. Among about a dozen beta customers, revenue reportedly rose more than 15%, while Gyft saw a 240% increase in users and a 17% boost in revenue. The team is led by co-founder and CEO Adam Marchick, who previously worked on Facebook’s growth team and recruited several prominent growth marketers as investors.

Total raised

$58M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Series B

Latest activity

Aug 2015