Customer engagement platform Batch raises $23 million after years of bootstrapping

If you’ve been working in the French tech ecosystem, you may remember a startup called AppGratis. The app discovery and promotion startup basically had to stop operating overnight following a long and nasty fight with Apple.

From the team that brought you AppGratis, Batch is a customer engagement platform that has been operating under the radar for many years. And now, the startup has raised a $23 million (€20 million) funding round led by Expedition Growth Capital with Orange Ventures also participating.

But Batch is a radically different product. It’s a customer engagement platform that competes with Braze as well as big enterprise solutions from Salesforce, Adobe, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft.

If you don’t work in martech, a customer engagement platform doesn’t mean much to you. But it’s quite easy to understand what it does. Batch started as a managed push notification platform for iOS, Android and the web.

Essentially, if you run a newspaper app, a banking app or an e-commerce app, you might need to send push notifications to your customers. Those notifications can be both transactional (you received a money transfer) or a marketing message (check this promotion).

Batch lets you manage those notifications at scale. You don’t have to make sure that your servers can handle a jump in traffic, you don’t have to maintain your push notification service.

From that idea, Batch has expanded beyond that to become an interesting martech platform. It integrates with your existing data sources, such as your CRM, CDP and analytics products. This way, you can create segments, orchestrate notifications, retarget your clients and more.

Batch currently handles 400 billion messages for its 300 enterprise clients. Those customers include Le Monde, Le Parisien, Eurosport, BNP Paribas, Société Générale, Leboncoin, etc. As you can imagine, each client is worth quite a lot of money.

With today’s funding round, the company wants to invest in its internal culture to attract more talent and retain existing talent. The startup will also hire more people to develop the product further and more people in sales and marketing to find new clients.

It has taken a bit of time to get there and recover from the AppGratis debacle. But Batch has clearly proven its resilience and now seems well positioned to win more customers and grow its platform.