Our Investment in Klaviyo: Intelligent e-Commerce Communication and Personalization at Scale

Today, we’re announcing our investment in Klaviyo, the leading e-commerce customer communications and personalization platform that serves over 50,000 customers in over 125 countries. 

Accel has a long history of partnering with iconic e-commerce brands like Jet.com, Etsy and Flipkart. Given this experience, we noticed the trend of merchants also wanting to build direct relationships with their customers and over the last several years, we tracked the accompanying rise of e-commerce enablement platforms and applications closely. Platforms like Klaviyo are shepherding in a new era of online shopping - not only helping traditional brick-and-mortar merchants of all sizes digitize and connect with their consumers directly but also becoming the platform of choice for a whole new wave of digitally native e-commerce companies.

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Klaviyo gives merchants the digital equivalent of an army of empathetic in-store sales representatives that deeply understand the preferences and thoughtfully anticipate the needs of their end customers, at scale. Using data captured across page visits, products viewed, previous purchase behavior, Klaviyo merchants can segment their customer base, create beautiful emails and highly relevant SMS messages using a drag-and-drop editor, and program communication sequences tailored to the individual.

By driving more loyalty and repeat relationships, Klaviyo customers generate more LTV and revenue from their end customers - directly attributable to these communications to the tune of $11 billion to-date! 

At the heart of the success of Klaviyo’s platform is the fact that they’ve been able to combine a sophisticated data platform (with accompanying advanced machine learning capabilities) with an approachable and easy-to-use interface. They’ve abstracted away the complexities and cost of building and maintaining data stores and data science teams. Furthermore, with deep native integrations with the major e-commerce platforms, customers can get going in minutes vs. weeks or months, given there’s no need for custom integration work. 

Klaviyo has democratized the intelligent data and marketing stack of the future, and put it in the hands of e-commerce merchants of all sizes, whether it’s the small mom-and-pop upstart, or innovative digitally-native brands like Chubbies, or giants like Unilever. We consistently heard from merchants that Klaviyo is a core platform for connecting with customers, with the interactions being captured only driving more strategic value over time as Klaviyo’s machine learning capabilities continue to learn how to segment and target better. 

What’s even more impressive is that like many other Accel companies such as Atlassian, Qualtrics,Tenable, Squarespace, and 1Password, Klaviyo was bootstrapped for much of its history and has been profitable since day one. By focusing on building incredible products and an amazing company culture, Klaviyo has enjoyed enviable organic growth and its momentum at scale is impressive, with their customer base doubling to more than 50,000 in the past 12 months. 

We’re thrilled to partner with founders, Andrew Bialecki and Ed Hallen, and the rest of the impressive team at Klaviyo. We first met Andrew in 2018 and across many meetings, (including a nail-biting Boston Celtics game!) we have been deeply impressed by their vision and we are delighted to support them in their mission to enable creators to directly own the relationships with their end customers and harness the power of data and machine learning to personalize communications. 

Read more about Klaviyo’s next chapter here, and coverage in TechCrunch here.

- Ping Li