Help is Just a Text Away: CRV’s Investment in Emotive
By Murat Bicer
In the COVID era, nearly everyone has struggled to maintain relationships. Small and midsize businesses, from apparel brands to health and wellness brands, all face the same problem. Old school email blasts have a wide reach, but they can often come across as impersonal. Customers still value helpful exchanges with brands but are unable to spend time in store for that one-to-one experience. Connecting authentically with customers isn’t a new problem, but the pandemic has exacerbated the issue. Human-to-human conversations convert into more sales because those interactions are as unique as the customers. It’s leaving all kinds of companies, from fashion brands to food delivery services, wondering, “I can’t see my customer face-to-face, so what’s the next best alternative?”
Email inboxes tend to fill and overflow, but text is different. Text is how we communicate with those closest to us… like friends and family members. We reply to texts quickly because they’re short, sweet, and relevant. Here at CRV, we discovered a dynamic team that’s tackling this problem head on. Emotive is an incredible new company that’s stitching businesses and customers together by enabling both parties to communicate seamlessly via text. Today I’m excited to announce that CRV is leading Emotive’s $50 million Series B and I’ll also be joining the company’s board of directors.
Brian Zatulove and Zach Wise, the founders of Emotive, remind me of another pair of first-time founders I met early on in their careers who went on to do great things. When I met the co-founders of Datadog, Olivier Pomel and Alexis Lê-Quôc, right before I invested in their seed round, I was amazed at how well they understood their rapidly evolving market. The Emotive team has that same ability to visualize and maneuver through a complex ecosystem.
Emotive’s text offering utilizes a mix of both artificial intelligence and real human customer service agents, so customers genuinely feel like they are able to quickly text back and forth with a human. …and the messages from Emotive campaigns are genuinely helpful. They’re nudges to customize your order before the cutoff date and pings regarding flash sales on items you love. For customers, Emotive is like having a personal assistant who provides useful reminders. Customers can get what they need and get on with their day. Companies can set up new campaigns in a matter of minutes. It’s like Emotive instantaneously adds more arms and legs to their teams. There’s also no down side when it comes to companies giving Emotive a test drive, which is another reason companies love them. In fact, Emotive guarantees a 5X ROI on money companies spend on Emotive.
There’s another reason we’re psyched to be investors in Emotive …and that’s because CRV has been passionate about the customer engagement space for years. Back in 2015, CRV led the Series A in an early-stage cross-channel marketing platform that’s synergistic to Emotive called Iterable. (Iterable has perfected one-way communications, campaign emails, and texts for large enterprise customers whereas Emotive’s sweet spot is interactive campaigns for small to midsize businesses.) Over the past six years as the lead investor and largest stakeholder in Iterable, we’ve watched this space evolve and seen customers delight in real-time conversation with the brands they love. Our early involvement in Iterable afforded CRV a first-hand opportunity to see the emergence of text messaging as a way for brands to authentically connect with their customers.
As a firm, we believe text will become as big as email over time as brands increasingly become even more maniacally focused on their customers. Customers continue to require a higher bar of customized recommendations, personalized service, and attention to detail, so we expect to see the need for solutions like Emotive continue to grow. Conversational text messaging is something we do every day with our friends and family, but retailers and brands are still in the nascent stages of harnessing text as a way to assist their customers. It’s early days, as they say, which is why we’re so bullish about this space. The e-commerce brands that quickly uncover the value of crafting meaningful dialogues between their customers will win lifelong fans of their brands.
At CRV we have a proven track record of investing early and backing founders, like Tony Xu and the founding team of DoorDash and Mikkel Svane of Zendesk, who go on to build wildly successful companies. We’re thrilled to welcome Brian, Zach and the Emotive team to the CRV family and can’t wait to help them take their business to the next level.
