Courier Announces $35M in Series B Funding Led by GV and Reveals New Mobile Notifications SDK
SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Courier, a platform for software developers to deliver better product notification experiences to their users, announced a $35M Series B today. The round was led by GV (formerly Google Ventures) with participation from existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Matrix Partners. Other existing investors include Twilio Ventures, Slack Fund, and Y Combinator. The new funding will be spent to scale the Courier team and evolve the product to better enable developers to deliver world-class notifications to their users, particularly focusing on improving the mobile experience.
Courier is also announcing a new mobile SDK that will enable mobile developers to deliver a much better notification experience for iOS and Android applications. Features of the SDK include the ability to programmatically manage tokens across devices, an embeddable notification inbox, as well as advanced deep linking functionality.
Strong Growth In An Emerging Category
Software notifications have become a ubiquitous part of modern life. The average person receives between 65 and 80 mobile notifications per day in addition to email notifications and notifications they receive through work apps like Slack and MS Teams. This often leads to a poor user experience that eventually causes users to turn off or tune out notifications completely. Building reliable, scalable notification infrastructure that also delivers a great user experience is expensive and complex. Companies like LinkedIn, Uber, and Airbnb have large engineering teams and spend millions of dollars annually building and maintaining their notification infrastructure.
Courier has pioneered the emerging notification infrastructure category with a platform that makes it easy for developers to deliver the helpful, contextual notifications users want without needing to invest millions of dollars and thousands of engineering hours.
“Courier is building the future of notification infrastructure. The company has a fast-growing set of customers with a need to provide the best possible notification experience,” said Sangeen Zeb, Partner at GV. “GV is thrilled to lead Courier’s Series B and partner with Troy Goode and the entire executive team as they deliver on an unparalleled approach to software notifications.”
Courier has experienced strong growth since the company raised its Series A from Bessemer in 2020. Courier grew annual recurring revenue by over 14X and added over 100 customers in 2021 including New Relic, LaunchDarkly, Color Health, and Lattice.
“As an engineer and engineering leader, I’ve built notification infrastructure many times over the last 20 years. It’s a complex engineering challenge that requires a lot of resources and expertise to do well,” said Troy Goode, founder and CEO of Courier. “This new round of funding is exciting because it will enable us to continue to invest in the best-in-class notification infrastructure platform that, as a developer, I’ve always wished existed.”
Announcing New Advanced Mobile Functionality
Courier is announcing new advanced mobile functionality that will make it far easier for mobile app developers to deliver a great mobile push notification to their users.
Mobile push notifications are often the most disruptive types of notification users receive on a daily basis. The multitude of devices, operating systems, and permission protocols also means that they are the most complex to build from an engineering and product standpoint. Today, Courier is announcing a new mobile token storage API that will make it far easier for developers to deliver a consistent and customizable experience across devices. Developers can now easily give users the ability to choose the types of notifications they want to receive across devices.
In addition, Courier is announcing a new notification inbox for mobile applications. This inbox allows users to access all the notifications they have received from an app in a single place, even if they have opted out of push notifications altogether. These tools are essential building blocks to delivering a less disruptive, more personalized mobile notification experience.
About Courier
Courier is the leader in the emerging notification infrastructure space, providing an API and Studio that empower engineering teams to deliver a best-in-class multi-channel notification experience. Courier (Twitter @trycourier) is headquartered in San Francisco, to learn more please visit courier.com or follow us on Twitter.
About GV
GV provides venture capital funding to bold new companies. Across the fields of life science, enterprise technology, consumer products and services, and frontier technology, GV’s portfolio companies aim to improve lives and transform industries. GV’s team of world-class engineers, designers, physicians, scientists, marketers, and investors work together to provide startups with exceptional support.
Launched as Google Ventures in 2009, GV is the venture capital arm of Alphabet, Inc. GV helps startups interface with Google, providing unique access to the world’s best technology and talent.
GV has over $8 billion under management. Notable investment outcomes include Uber, Slack, One Medical Group, Nest, Flatiron Health, and Duo Security. GV is headquartered in Mountain View, California, with offices in San Francisco, Boston, New York, and London.
Contacts
Nick Gottlieb, VP Growth and Marketing
nick@courier.com