South African startup integrating hyper-personalization into mobile marketing, Mobiz, has raised a pre-Series A round of $ 4 million from HAVAÍC, Futuregrowth, Launch Africa, Allan Gray E-Squared Ventures, CapaciTech, and Endeavor’s Harvest Fund. The investment comes as the startup is ramping up efforts to expand into the U.S. and double down on marketing, sales, and account management. Part of the investment will be used to hire more staff in South Africa and support the commercial expansion to the U.S.
Mobiz cemented itself in its home market with a Telkom partnership early this year.
Mobiz works as a code-free tool that helps marketers, enterprises, and SMBs create and send SMS campaigns to their customers without any marketing experience. CEO Greg Chen founded the company in 2014 came from his 15-year span in the mobile industry, noticing how enterprises in South Africa struggled to target and engage their customers via SMS efficiently.
The SMB market in the U.S. is projected to reach $12.5 billion and is expected to register a CAGR of 20.3% from 2019 to 2025, according to a report by Grandview Research. Chen says that part of this growth is buoyed by the ineffectiveness of email marketing in the U.S (similar to SMS marketing in Africa) where customers are inundated and spammed.
SMS marketing in the U.S., on the other hand, has more value because customers need to give marketers and businesses consent to receive regular SMS messages from them. For these businesses, it means that customers who provide them with access actually want to engage.
CEO Greg Chen said: “This has revolutionized the way marketers used to think about things when they used to say more is better. Now it’s talking to the people who actually want to buy from you and spending more money in acquiring them in a consent way and then engage with a very high return investment in the most direct channel and is no more direct channel than SMS.”
With Mobiz, small and medium businesses such as a coffee shop can quickly know the particular type of coffee 100+ customers like because of the information gathered from templates used on the platform. This dynamic and instant customization improves conversions, results, sales, and engagement rates for these businesses. This month, the company is going live with more than 200-plus beta users in the U.S. currently active on the platform.
