Founding

Defining Organizational Purpose

Klaviyo co-founders Andrew Bialecki and Ed Hallen started Klaviyo in 2012 to provide businesses of all sizes with the tools to be maximally successful and do it on their own terms. The company’s software enables businesses to drive revenue growth by making it easy to bring their first-party data together and use it to create and deliver highly personalized consumer experiences across digital channels.

Andrew and Ed self-funded Klaviyo in its early years, and from the beginning, they took a customer-first approach to product development. The Klaviyo platform was designed with a north star of helping businesses improve their engagement and drive revenue. We believe this uncompromising focus on the customer set the company on a path of growth. As Klaviyo delivers significant measurable and attributable value to its customers, these customers become powerful advocates of Klaviyo’s solution, which allows the company to benefit from a strong word-of-mouth motion.

Driving Adoption

Unifying Data and the Applications They Power

When we met Andrew and Ed, it was clear to us that the Klaviyo team not only recognized the growing importance of personalized customer experiences in driving business success, but also understood the challenges brands faced in leveraging their own data to do so. It is not enough to manage data; businesses need to be able to put that data into action quickly. Klaviyo’s modern and intuitive SaaS platform was designed to help bridge that gap by consolidating those data and application layers into one vertically-integrated solution with advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities.

This approach enables business users of any skill level harness their data in order to send customers the right message at the right time, more accurately measure and predict performance, and deploy the specific actions and campaigns that drive the highest impact. Klaviyo’s solutions leverage data from the channels a company already “owns” (e.g., email, SMS, website and mobile applications) to build and maintain direct customer relationships and reduce dependence on third-party channels or marketplaces. We believe that the platform’s ability to track customer behavior, deliver impactful consumer experiences, and drive conversions enabled Klaviyo to garner attention, and ultimately led to the platform’s adoption among many e-commerce businesses and an increase in market recognition.

Accelerating Growth

Building for Scale

By 2018, Klaviyo reached an inflection point; with more than 10,000 customers and a robust product vision, the company had an opportunity to build on its already significant momentum. In April 2019, Klaviyo raised an approximately $150 million growth investment from Summit Partners. Since then, the Klaviyo team has worked to scale the organization, launch new products, expand the company’s geographic presence, raise additional capital and formalize key strategic partnerships with leading e-commerce platforms and technology providers.

We believe this investment helped position Klaviyo to support its customers during a time of unprecedented challenge. The COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with changes to Apple’s consent rules for user tracking in 2020, ushered in a new era of complexity for brands; marketers were faced with the challenge of capturing growing consumer demand and reaching their customers in a highly competitive market, all while losing an important source of third-party data. We believe that Klaviyo’s growing product portfolio and unwavering commitment to leveraging first-party data proved invaluable in helping these businesses navigate this new landscape with confidence.

Enduring Impact

Providing a Central Source of Truth for Marketing and Analysis

With a focus on empowering businesses through personalized customer experiences and data ownership, Klaviyo continues to reshape how brands connect with their customers. Today, the company operates at the forefront of a rapidly evolving marketing landscape, providing solutions that help companies store, analyze and predictively use data in a single, vertically-integrated platform.

The Klaviyo team continues to emphasize a customer-first approach and is guided by the north star of helping businesses improve their engagement and drive revenue through the metric “Klaviyo Attributed Value” or “KAV”⁽¹⁾, the amount of revenue that customers generate with specific engagements through the Klaviyo platform. Klaviyo delivered more than $37 billion of KAV to its customers in 2022, and as of June 30, 2023, Klaviyo had assembled over 6.9 billion consumer profiles across its customer base to help derive new insights and ultimately drive revenue generation. We believe that the milestones achieved, partnerships forged and impact made are a testament to Klaviyo’s unyielding dedication to innovation, adaptability and, above all, the success of the businesses it has helped empower.