Brightback Launches with $11 Million in Funding to Lead Automated Customer Retention for High Volume Subscription Businesses

Brightback launched today with $11 million in total funding, and unveiled the industry’s first customer retention automation software for subscription businesses. Index Ventures led the Series A investment round, with participation from existing investors Point Nine Capital, Matrix Partners, and Rembrandt Venture Partners.

“As an industry, we're hooked on growing through acquisition alone, even though retention, not acquisition, is the bedrock of successful SaaS and subscription growth,” said Guy Marion, CEO and co-founder of Brightback. “Businesses aren't sharing that they typically see 30% to 60% of their customers cancel every year, which is eating away at growth. Brightback is the way out of the acquisition-at-all-costs mentality. We’re here to help companies leverage automation to enrich the user experience at critical points in the customer journey and retain users at scale.”

Brightback aims to fill the white space between CRM-based software that helps customer success teams to manage high-value B2B customers, and automation-based customer engagement tools that help growth marketers to acquire, nurture and onboard new users.

Marion’s founding of the company stems from 12 years of leadership experience at high-growth software-as-a-service companies like Zendesk and Autopilot. Brightback’s mission is to make customer retention every company’s new growth strategy by creating delightful experiences and targeted workflows that automatically retain customers for longer while delivering the insights needed to improve.

Retention is the new growth strategy

After working for nine months with SaaS leaders such as Copper, Crazy Egg, and SparkPost, Brightback successfully pinpoints the reasons why customers want to cancel, classifies at-risk customers who signal concern but have yet to leave, then intervenes automatically with targeted and contextual experiences.   

“To win on experience today you need to pay attention to customers throughout the lifecycle and be in a position to respond quickly to any opportunities to expand or save customer relationships,” said Suneet Bhatt, General Manager at Crazy Egg. “With Brightback, we deflect one in four cancellation requests. More powerfully, we segmented all churn events and found that 40 percent are preventable. We restructured our team to jump on customers who never onboarded correctly, or need more time to learn, with a target of saving tens of thousands of dollars every month."

A system built to reduce cancellations automatically

The Brightback customer retention automation platform identifies, and segments customers based on actionability, then creates product-based experiences and save workflows that give unfulfilled customers what they need. Brightback has been able to measure and reduce cancellations by more than 20 percent for pilot customers within two months of launching. Sixty seven percent of retained customers are still paying six months later.

Experiences and workflows are tailored to customers at the moment they consider leaving, and are continually optimized as they gather more data. System components include:

• Personalized cancel experiences tailored for the individual based on product usage or data insights and designed with user delight and brand compliance in mind.

• Customer segmentation and automation that creates retention workflows by integrating with popular customer engagement tools, including support tickets in Zendesk, live chats in Intercom, enriched Slack and email alerts, interactions with CRMs like Salesforce and Totango, and triggers to more than 1000 apps via Segment and Zapier.

• Dashboards and insights for growth executives, and actionable watch lists, feeds, and reports for success managers to engage users based on cancel reason, sentiment, competitor, activity, and more.

Personalized cancel experiences tailored for the individual based on product usage or data insights and designed with user delight and brand compliance in mind.

Customer segmentation and automation that creates retention workflows by integrating with popular customer engagement tools, including support tickets in Zendesk, live chats in Intercom, enriched Slack and email alerts, interactions with CRMs like Salesforce and Totango, and triggers to more than 1000 apps via Segment and Zapier.

Dashboards and insights for growth executives, and actionable watch lists, feeds, and reports for success managers to engage users based on cancel reason, sentiment, competitor, activity, and more.

About Brightback

Brightback is the first automated customer retention software for subscription businesses. High volume subscription businesses such as Copper and Crazy Egg use Brightback to successfully retain customers by reducing up to 20 percent of cancellations. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, and includes a remote-first workforce of mostly Silicon Valley emigrants now living across the globe. http://www.brightback.com

Media contact: Ann [at] pitchpublicrelations [dot] com (Ann [at] pitchpublicrelations [dot] com). 480-263-1557