Iterable

Sacra estimates that Iterable hit $200M annual recurring revenue (ARR) at the end of 2023, up 38% from $145M in 2022.

Iterable previously crossed $100M of ARR in October 2021, $10M of ARR in November 2017, and $1M of ARR in September 2015.

Iterable is valued at $2 billion as of 2024.

Based on 2021 data, when the company had $115M in revenue and a $2 billion valuation, Iterable traded at a 17.4x revenue multiple.

The company has raised $342.9 million across 10 funding rounds, with backing from prominent investors including Silver Lake, Viking Global Investors, and CRV. The investor roster also includes strategic partners like Capital One Ventures and Adams Street Partners.

Iterable is an enterprise cross-channel marketing automation platform that lets users build personalized customer engagement campaigns across email, SMS, push notifications, in-and app messages.

Ex-Twitter engineer Justin Zhu and ex-Googler Andrew Boni started Iterable in 2013 after seeing the challenges that marketers were having building personalized email campaigns.

At the time, most email marketers were sending "batch and blast" campaigns—only big, sophisticated brands with the resources to invest in marketing engineering were running personalized campaigns to people based on e.g. their past purchases or interests.

Iterable found product-market fit with a simple tool for startups that gave them an email marketing layer on top of their existing product analytics deployment, from Segment to Mixpanel.

Within Iterable, marketers could easily use the existing customer data they were collecting to set up automatic email campaigns and A/B test different kinds of messaging.

Key features of Iterable today include: (1) Visual workflow builder to design multi-step campaigns without coding, (2) Real-time behavioral data ingestion from SDKs, APIs, and data warehouses, and (3) AI-powered optimization for send time, channel, and content personalization.

Iterable generates revenue primarily through subscriptions, with some amount of professional services and usage-based revenue from usage of its messaging channels.

Customers pay a recurring subscription fee, typically annually or monthly, to access Iterable's platform and services. Fees start at a minimum of $500 per month, and scale up based a number of factors: (1) Number of customer profiles or users, (2) Volume of messages sent, (3) Number of data sources integrated, and (4) Additional product functionality or services utilized

As customers grow their business and customer base, their usage of Iterable's platform increases, resulting in higher subscription fees over time.

In addition to subscription revenue, Iterable generates revenue from professional services related to the implementation, configuration, and training for its platform. These services are billed on a time and materials basis.

Iterable also earns a portion of revenue from transaction-based fees for messaging channels like SMS, where fees are charged based on the volume of messages sent through those channels.

In the marketing automation and customer engagement space, Iterable competes with companies like Attentive, Braze, Customer.io, Klaviyo, and others.

Attentive: A SMS-focused platform that lets brands create personalized messaging by using behavioral data for segmentation. Attentive's focus on SMS and email means that it doesn't offer the same breadth of channels as Iterable.

Braze: A leading customer engagement platform that enables relevant and personalized experiences across channels like email, mobile, web, etc. Braze is particularly strong in mobile marketing automation.

Klaviyo: An email marketing automation platform popular among ecommerce businesses for its native integrations with platforms like Shopify.

Customer.io: A data-driven marketing platform focused on triggered messaging campaigns based on customer behaviors and real-time data integration. Platforms like Customer.io index on being flexible for technical growth teams to tweak to create customized messages, whereas Iterable focuses on providing the best-fit solution for marketing and product teams.

Large enterprise CRM platforms like Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Adobe Campaign also offer customer journey orchestration and marketing automation features that overlap with Iterable's offerings.

Over the last few years, many of Iterable's key product releases have hinged on making it easier to bring customer data into Iterable and make it useful—via smart imports from a cloud data warehouse, better tooling for marketers to use that data, and tooling for teams to add custom fields into their customer profiles.

Iterable's expansion into customer data management aligns with what we're seeing in the rest of the martech, salestech, and product analytics stack under the threat of the center of gravity of customer data shifting to the data warehouse: SaaS platforms like Salesforce and Amplitude are building direct integrations so customers can pull data from and push data to Snowflake.

An increasing amount of value is now accruing to the "fat data layer" made up of the CRM, CDP and the data warehouse, in contrast to 10~ years ago where most value in SaaS accrued at the workflow layer. We’ve gone from tools like Mailchimp with their thin, native, siloed CRMs to tools like Iterable and Klaviyo with their own in-built CDPs and integrations into other tools and the data warehouse.

Iterable launched its first international office in London in 2019, adding onto their San Francisco headquarters and two satellite offices in New York and Denver. Continued international expansion represents a significant growth opportunity for Iterable, even if the United States is likely to contribute the majority of their revenue—at Salesforce, for example, the Americas represent 70% of revenue, with Europe contributing the next-highest percentage.