Built to enable digital brands to better personalized marketing campaigns, Kiliba has just secured €7 million in a seed funding round. The French startup has seen impressive early traction and now aims to become a market leader in Europe’s martech space.
Marketing is all about communicating, attracting and winning over customers, potential clients, and partners, and painting a brand or company in the best possible light. It’s a crucial component of business strategy, regardless of the industry or sector. The most important part of marketing strategy? It’s a big question, but most marketing teams and leaders will mention personalisation.
Taking a personal, tailored approach to outreach, customer acquisition and retention, and addressing the target market brings better engagement and connection between brands and their audience/clients. However, making ultra-personalised marketing campaigns, in this era of targeting a mass market, isn’t so simple. That’s what startup Kiliba aims to help with, having developed a smart automation platform that enables digital brands to create, personalize and send marketing campaigns.
Founded in 2020 by Amaury Hug de Larauze and Arnaud Becker, the French startup has just secured €7 million in a seed funding round. The details:
- The round was led by Otium Capital, FrenchFounders and Bleu Capital.
- Included backing from AB Tasty founders, Alix de Sagazan and Rémi Aubert and Nima Karimi (Silvr)
- Historical business angels include Thibaud Hug de Larauze (Back Market), Geoffroy de Becdelièvre (Marco Vasco) and Bertrand Jelensperger (TheFork)
Improving marketing campaign performance
The Kiliba platform was built based on the two founders’ experience working in the email marketing space over the past decade, witnessing first-hand how this process has been shaped by increased digitisation and changing societal trends.
Amaury Hug de Larauze, co-founder of Kiliba: “Artificial Intelligence takes care of everything. Digital retailers just have to connect Kiliba with their CMS. We then generate email campaigns that integrate the company’s design identity and translate them into multiple languages. Emails are personalized using 22 scenarios tailored to the user’s profile, then sent at the best possible time, depending on the targeted audience. All of which takes only 10 minutes to set up!”
The martech platform differentiates itself from legacy players through its simplicity and ease of use. By automating scenarios and unlocking a deeper level of granularity, Kiliba allows its clients to deploy highly customizable scenarios in minutes.
Kiliba then aims to go a step further, beyond just creating the campaign and delving into revenue-boosting. Through the platform, retailers can use AI-driven targeting to identify the right customers and timing. The team claims that by using the platform, users are getting an impressive 52% average open rate (as high as 80% with some clients), in comparison with a 25% industry-wide average. The return on investment exceeds traditional email marketing benchmarks by 50%.
Arnaud Becker, Kiliba’s co-founder: “The volume of data available has become more and more extensive over the last ten years, making it difficult for advertisers to optimize their targeting. As a result, over 80% of emails are left unread. Kiliba leverages CMS data and artificial intelligence to unlock precise and efficient targeting, tripling the opening rate. And recipients are more attentive and likely to be interested in the message.”
Smart targeting also enables advertisers to reduce the number of emails sent to their customers. And by reducing the volume of emails sent, carbon emissions from email marketing are cut by a third.
Aiming to become a European martech leader
In only 18 months, Kiliba has gone from 0 to 1M€ of ARR and has signed more than 400 customers. The market is worth around €11 billion, so there is plenty of space to grow and Kiliba is certainly disrupting the space with early traction. In the last 12 months, the company saw its revenue increase by 300%.
Going forward, the startup will focus its efforts on e-retailers with less than 10 million in annual revenue. Following the raise, the company will continue focusing on its technical infrastructure by adding new CMS to the platform. The team will also see the addition of new data scientists and sales representatives.
Jérémie Bordier, Venture Partner at Otium Capital: “Kiliba revolutionizes this mature and historic market. Its ease of use provides all e-retailers with perfectly adapted scenarios in minutes. Each email is automatically yet thoroughly personalized for the customer. We were immediately convinced by Kiliba, a reflection of Amaury and Arnaud’s extensive experience in this sector.”
