Xeno, the commerce marketing automation engine, has announced it has raised $1.6 million in a Seed round from global funds including early Klaviyo backer TJ Mahony’s Vinyl Capital, Ankur Nagpal’s Vibe Capital, Java Capital and Angel Invest Ventures.
Curefoods founder Ankit Nagori, Mamaearth founder Varun Alagh, Apache Cassandra’s Prashant Malik, CRED’s Kunal Shah and Miten Sampat, Haptik founder Aakrit Vaish, Loginext founder Dhruvil Sanghvi, Profitwheel founder Vivek Bhargava, Fynd founder Farooq Adam, Verlinvest’s Arjun Vaidya, Tracxn founder Abhishek Goyal and several other founders/ operators also participated in the round.
Commenting on the fundraising, Pranav Ahuja, Co-Founder & CEO, Xeno said, “At Xeno, we are on a mission to enable over 100,000 brands to build experiences and marketing-specific to an individual customer. This might feel like a solved problem, but it isn’t. Just see the SMS’s you get on your phone. This fundraise, mostly from entrepreneurs who’ve personally experienced this problem, is further validation of our mission.”
Funds to be used for expanding team
Xeno plans to utilize the funding to expand its workforce across engineering, product, marketing, sales, and customer success.
It is hiring for multiple roles and plans to double its team size in 2022. “We are poised to achieve accelerated growth this year owing to the superiority of our platform and our team's unmatched capabilities. Therefore, a significant portion of the fundraising will be invested in building our team strength,” said Ahuja.
“In my opinion, online shopping across industries like beauty, fashion, groceries, essentials, etc., is undergoing a massive shift and 5G will take this to a whole new dimension towards the end of this year. As we move ahead, we are excited to deliver data-driven personalized experiences through AI, ML, Big Data, and other emerging technologies that ensure our clients remain market leaders,” said Ayushmaan Kapoor, Co-Founder and COO, Xeno.
'Future of retail is omnichannel'
Varun Alagh, Co-Founder & CEO of Mamaearth added, “The future of retail is omnichannel and the most important metric continues to be driving repeats. As the D2C (direct-to-consumer) space crosses $100 billion by 2025, every brand will require commerce marketing automation solutions to compete and win.”
"Xeno caught our eye because the team, architecture, and vision reminded me of when we first invested in Klaviyo... but operating in markets that behave quite differently. Most impressive was the traction and quality of product Xeno established on minimal capital,” said TJ Mahony, Founder and Partner, Vinyl Capital.
