Ecommerce Marketing Automation Platform Klaviyo received a $100 million strategic investment from Shopify, according to documents archived with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The unveiling coincided with the Announcement that Klaviyo and Shopify will strengthen their existing partnership by making Klaviyo the recommended email product for Shopify’s premium merchant plan, Shopify Plus, while giving Klaviyo early access to Shopify features in development.
“We’ve been working closely with Shopify for years and this is a great next step,” Klaviyo CEO Andrew Bialecki told toptecheasy.com via email. “I’ve talked to their product team and CEO many times — they strongly believe in our mission to empower creators, and they have great respect for the products we’ve built and our customer-centric, product-driven culture. Shopify has been key to our growth and a great team to work with and we are excited that this will help us move faster and help more of their customers.”
Founded in 2012, Boston-based Klaviyo integrates with existing platforms (e.g. Octane AI, Recharge) – which toptecheasy.com has extensively profiled – to automate sending emails and text messages to customers. With Klaviyo, businesses can set up triggers for abandoned cart messages, product recommendations, and more, using a range of templates and predictive analytics tools.
There’s no shortage of competition in the tech space for marketing automation (see Sendlane, Sendinblue, and Cordial to name a few). But Klaviyo has done incredibly well, reaching over 100,000 paying customers, including Unilever, Dermalogica, Solo Stove, and Citizen Watches.
To date, Klaviyo, which has more than 1,000 employees, has raised approximately $775 million. As of May 2021, the startup was valued at $9.5 billion by investors including Sands Capital, Counterpoint Global, Accel and Summit Partners.
For Shopify, Klaviyo is the latest in a series of investments and acquisitions aimed at expanding the reach of the ecommerce platform. In May, Shopify bought shipping logistics startup Deliverr for $2.1 billion — the largest purchase in Shopify’s history — to launch an “end-to-end” logistics platform for merchants. This week, Shopify invested in Single, a music and video app used by many businesses on Shopify, following a stock pledge in CMS developer Sanity.
As far as they have a focus, Shopify’s past year of investment has tended toward recommendations and martech. Last September, Shopify invested in and partnered with Yotpo, which provides marketing tools and products to consumer merchants. The e-commerce giant recently injected capital into Crossing Minds, a startup that offers a platform that ostensibly delivers “personalized experiences” without using personal data.
There is certainly pressure on Shopify to better withstand what will likely be a prolonged economic downturn. Last month, the company laid off 10% of its staff — about 1,000 employees — in what CEO and founder Tobi Lütke described as a “necessary” move in response to users withdrawing online orders and returning to old shopping habits. The company posted a net loss of $1.2 billion for the second quarter of 2022 and warned shareholders last week during an appeal to expect inflation to affect earnings for the remainder of the year.
