Braze, Inc.

Braze is a customer engagement platform that helps brands deliver personalized, real-time messaging across email, push notifications, in-app messaging, SMS, WhatsApp, web messaging, and connected TV. Bill Magnuson, Jon Hyman, and Mark Ghermezian founded it in 2011 under the name Appboy in New York City. It was built from the ground up as a real-time platform, processing billions of data points and delivering billions of messages.

The real-time data streaming architecture is what makes Braze different. It ingests and acts on customer events as they happen. Purchases, app opens, page views, location changes, custom events. Marketers can trigger contextually relevant messages within seconds. Legacy marketing automation platforms process data in periodic batches. Braze responds instantly. If a customer abandons their cart, the message goes out in moments, not hours.

Product capabilities include multi-channel campaign orchestration with Canvas Flow, behavioral audience segmentation, personalization through Liquid templating and AI, A/B and multivariate testing, journey building with branching logic, intelligent delivery timing, and comprehensive analytics. Content Cards provide persistent, personalized experiences within apps and websites.

BrazeAI features include a Predictive Suite for churn prediction and engagement scoring, content generation for subject lines and copy, send-time optimization, and channel selection optimization. The AI helps identify the right message, channel, and timing for each individual customer.

Braze targets consumer-facing brands. Retail, e-commerce, media, financial services, food and beverage, travel, health and wellness, and on-demand services are the primary verticals. Customers include Burger King, HBO Max, Venmo, and Grubhub among thousands of others.

The go-to-market combines direct enterprise sales with technology partners, agencies, and system integrators. The open architecture integrates with data warehouses like Snowflake and BigQuery, CDPs like Segment and mParticle, analytics tools, and commerce platforms.

Annual revenue is roughly $580 million with gross margins around 68%. Revenue is subscription-based. Net revenue retention exceeds 115%. Operating margins are approaching breakeven as the company scales.

With about 1,800 employees and a platform processing tens of billions of data points daily, Braze has established itself as the leading modern customer engagement platform. It's displacing legacy marketing clouds from Salesforce, Oracle, and Adobe among digital-first brands that need real-time, personalized communication.