Enabling The Digital Makeover

It was a practical problem — of re­taining and engaging users in mobile apps — that led Raviteja Dodda, a soft­ware engineer and an entrepreneur, to  launch MoEngage, along with Yash­wanth Kumar, in 2014.

With MoEngage, a next-generation marketing cloud for the mobile-first world, companies can now orchestrate campaigns across channels like push, email, in-app messaging, web push and sms, with auto-optimisation to­wards higher conversions powered by machine learning.

MoEngage works with consumer businesses across the world including Fortune 500 brands like Samsung, Deutsche Telekom (T Mobile), Vodafone, Hearst and Prudential.

Explaining the work being done by MoEn­gage, Dodda says that since traditional mar­keting clouds are expensive to implement, hard to learn and rule-based, MoEngage is building an enterprise software that is easier to use, fully integrated and learning-based.  The platform continuously analyses smart­phone users and the information is used to send periodic customised notifications to get users to use particular apps, he informs.

“Our revenue has grown 3x over the last one year, and our business has transformed from a single product offering to a multi-product suite with 60 per cent of our rev­enues coming from international markets... I spend a good amount of time traveling to our focus markets, meeting our customers,” says Dodda, CEO, MoEn­gage in an email interac­tion with BW.

A serial entrepreneur, Ravi started his journey by successfully co-found­ing Delight Circle, an app for spotting best deals that helped e-commerce companies drive mobile conversions early on.

It was with Delight Circle and learnings from his experience of working with e-commerce com­panies that led Dodda to start MoEngage as an AI-powered, om­nichannel user analytics and engagement platform that helps mobile-forward com­panies reduce churn and improve customer lifetime value.  

The underlying objective was to help cus­tomers get the best out of marketing auto­mation to achieve early growth.  

Dodda is said to have built MoEngage from the ground up into a formidable com­pany that is constantly innovating and bringing cutting-edge AI-backed capabili­ties into the hands of marketers. Be it tech and product, or sales/marketing and cus­tomer success, Dodda is deeply involved in all major aspects of the company’s progress, thanks to his ability to don various hats as the situation demands.

Backed by Alchemist Accelerator, He­lion Venture Partners, Exfinity Ventures, MoEngage has raised $6 million till date. It has also entered and established itself in key international markets like Southeast Asia and Europe.

Says Dodda: “MoEngage is an enabler of digital transformation for traditional enter­prises like Airtel, Aditya Birla Group, Times of India and Internet startups like OYO, Grofers, OnlineTyari, Lybrate alike. Access to services has been a difficulty for most of the Indians who don’t live in Tier-1 cities and Internet enables the same. We are helping more users in India come online and enable great experiences with brands across verti­cals like online banking, insurance, bill payments, news, education, health­care and entertainment.”

According to him, Mo­Engage currently enables digital experiences for more than 200 million us­ers in India every month. “Besides, the company has been helping build the careers of around 100 peo­ple and our ex-employees have started up building the careers for more peo­ple indirectly,” says Dodda while listing his company’s  achievements so far.

An alumnus of Indian Institute of Tech­nology, Kharagpur with a degree in Com­puter Science, Dodda co-founded his first startup while still a student at his alma ma­ter. He was a Google Summer of Code stu­dent for two years and contributed widely to the Open Source community. At the age of 19, he published a paper on cross-cloud management on Springer,  a renowned in­ternational science and tech journal.