Iterable Inc., a startup that uses artificial intelligence to improve the effectiveness of enterprises’ marketing campaigns, has raised a $200 million funding round at a $2 billion valuation from a group of prominent investors.

Silver Lake, Adams Street Partners, Glynn Capital and DTCP participated in the funding round, which Iterable announced this morning. They were joined by returning investors CRV, Viking Global Investors, Blue Cloud Ventures and Capital One Ventures.

San Francisco-based Iterable provides a cloud platform that enables marketing teams to display personalized promotions such as shopping recommendations to their companies’ customers. The platform can deliver promotions via email, inside a company’s e-commerce app, through push notifications and using a variety of other channels. Iterable harnesses AI algorithms to personalize the marketing content automatically to each individual user’s preferences, which it says can help brands generate more revenue.

At the core of Iterable’s AI feature set is a tool it calls Catalog. Using the tool, a marketing team can create promotional emails such as a message containing a list of restaurant recommendations. From there, Catalog’s AI algorithms automatically personalize the list of restaurant recommendations that appear in each individual email based on historical marketing data such as recipients’ past orders.

Iterable uses historical marketing data for other tasks as well, such as identifying the most opportune times to target customers. Its AI identifies when a company’s users are most likely to engage with an ad and helps marketers schedule campaigns accordingly.

The startup provides another set of features for managing marketing campaigns aimed at mobile users. Its platform allows companies to equip their apps with features such as purchase confirmations and includes tools that enable marketers to display personalized promotions in a mobile-optimized format. 

Iterable collects the data its algorithms use to personalize promotions according to customers’ preferences using a set of connectors that can pull marketing information from a company’s internal systems. The startup claims its platform processes tens of billions of individual data points for its largest clients. Iterable’s customer list features more than 700 companies, among them Box Inc., DoorDash Inc. and other major tech firms.

Iterable says its installed base spans more than 30 countries. The startup has lately been seeing particularly strong sales growth in Europe, where it nearly tripled the size of its customer base over the last year. Using the new funding, Iterable plans to boost its headcount from 450 employees to 600 by year’s end to support continued growth.

Marketing technology startups have raised billions of dollars in funding over the last few quarters. MessageBird B.V., a Dutch startup with a platform for managing customer interactions across online channels, raised $800 million last month. The investment followed a $240 million funding round for marketing automation startup ActiveCampaign Inc. and a $200 million funding round for Sprinklr Inc., which provides a so-called customer experience management platform. 

Image: Iterable