UPDATED 09:30 EDT / JANUARY 16 2019

CLOUD

With Accengage buy, Urban Airship aims to become mobile engagement powerhouse

Mobile users accounted for an estimated 57 percent of web traffic in the U.S. last year. Urban Airship Inc., a marketing technology startup backed by $100 million from investors, today acquired fellow startup Accengage SA to secure a leadership position in this key market.

Both companies compete in the customer engagement market. They provide platforms that enable brands to target consumers with tailored messages, such as product suggestions customized based on a user’s shopping history. Paris-based Accengage’s namesake platform is built specifically with mobile users in mind.

Accengage enables brands to distribute content via in-app push notifications, Facebook Messenger and their websites. This core feature set is complemented by an array of capabilities for increasing message relevance. Marketers can use the platform to segment customers into audiences, customize their content for each group and create automation rules to trigger messages at times when a user is most likely to be receptive.

Accengage claims to be the largest push notification provider in Europe. The startup’s platform is used by major brands such as McDonald’s Corp., The Walt Disney Co. and BNP Paribas SA, the world’s eighth-largest bank.

Urban Airship is absorbing all these customers as part of the acquisition. Accengage will bolster the existing mobile capabilities of its engagement platform, which claims an even bigger list of enterprise users that includes 25 percent of the Fortune 100.

Those customers share expertise in many of the same high-growth industry verticals — retail, finance, media and travel — and use the same back-end technologies and programming languages, Urban Airship said. The two companies also complement each other regionally: Urban Airship claims to be the dominant vendor in the Americas, Nordic countries and the U.K., while Accengage said it leads in France, Germany, Spain and Italy.

Urban Airship said that the deal will make it the world’s largest mobile customer engagement provider. The startup has delivered more than 2.4 trillion messages to date and will send more than 90 billion messages per month in the wake of the deal.

Accengage will continue to operate from its Paris office, taking on the role of Urban Airship’s new European hub. All its employees are joining Urban Airship under the leadership of co-founder and Chief Executive Patrick Mareuil, who will become the company’s director of Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Photo: Unsplash

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