Customer.io Building Open CDP Layer
Colin Nederkoorn, founder & CEO at Customer.io, on the CDP layer in messaging
This reveals Customer.io is trying to become the system of record for product led customer messaging, while pushing specialized features to partners instead of cramming every workflow into one product. The logic is simple. Core data and orchestration look similar across customers, but adjacent jobs like CRM, in app experiences, and vertical specific workflows vary too much by industry to build well as one generic module.
-
Customer.io’s CDP, Data Pipelines, was built to work standalone and send data to outside tools, even competing messaging products like Braze or Iterable. That makes the platform open by design, not a closed bundle. The bet is that owning the customer profile and event stream creates the natural place for partners to plug in.
-
This is also a way to avoid the multi product trap of selling many niche tools to many different buyers. Nederkoorn draws the boundary around customer communication infrastructure, then uses integrations for things like CRM instead of building separate B2B and B2C versions that would splinter the roadmap.
-
The pattern mirrors how other software markets evolve. HubSpot bought Clearbit to deepen its customer record, while Klaviyo added CDP, SMS, and in app to keep more data and workflow in house. Customer.io is taking the more neutral route, pairing its own growth from $50M ARR in 2023 toward $100M by late 2025 with acquisitions like Parcel and Gist around the core workflow.
If this works, Customer.io becomes less like a single messaging app and more like the base layer that other vendors build against. That should let it keep widening its product surface without losing focus, and make ecosystem revenue, partner services, and developer tooling a bigger part of how the company compounds from here.