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Notifications may seem like a solved problem. After all, you’re probably already getting more than you want. the two founders of Knock, Sam Seely and Chris Bell argue that although many companies have solved the “last-mile delivery problem”, there is still more work to be done. While products like Twilio and SendGrid may offer developer-friendly APIs, the Knock founders believe there is really a need for a more comprehensive solution that combines notification delivery with a comprehensive workflow engine and integrated monitoring tools. Is.
The company, which launched in 2021, today announced a $12 million funding round led by Craft Ventures. At the time of launch, the company also raised a previously undisclosed $6 million seed round led by Afor Capital. Preface Ventures, WorkLife, Expa Ventures, Cofound Partners, and Tokyo Black also invested in these rounds, as well as angel investors such as Vercel co-founder and CEO Guillermo Rauch and Behance co-founder Scott Belsky.
Image Credit: Knock
“Today, if you’re an engineering team for any type of product — whether it’s SaaS or developer tools, or consumer products — there are common services that used to be built in-house that you can now turn to APIs for. are,” said Sam Seely, CEO of Knock. “Now, all the best engineers who want to work for pay go to work at Stripe; And all those great people who want to work on discovery, go to Algolia. It felt like the notification infrastructure part of it was still something you had to build in-house.
Seely and Bell tell me that they went back to the drawing board to see what a modern notification system would look like and what the basics they would need to build would be. At the end of the day, notifications aren’t a differentiator for most products, but they are a must. So if a product like Knock can speed up the development workflow, it’s a win-win.
The real differentiator for Knock is that it provides tooling to not only send notifications, but also pull data from third-party tools that can trigger workflow logic specified by the developer for their specific use case (e.g. Translating a message) to a global audience).
Image Credit: Knock
“We have an entire workflow engine – it’s really the core of the product,” Seely explained. “That’s where you’re defining when something is triggered. We call the Knock API, run through this workflow, batch the messages at this cadence, throttle them so users don’t get spam, and then send this in-app message, this email message. Send.
This workflow engine is accessible through a web-based user interface, but as the team emphasizes, all of this functionality is also available programmatically. “A big focus for us is on building that workflow engine that drives cross-channel engagement, but then bringing it into everyday developer workflows,” Seely said.
Over time, Knock plans to delve deeper into the customer engagement space as well. The team argues that whenever a new channel emerges, existing players in the sector – for example, SAP’s Precise Target – have difficulty catching up.
“Users are tired of the onslaught and wave of emails and push notifications,” Seely said. “This is the true native product experience that adds value to users and helps companies increase engagement and retention – and all the reasons you send notifications in the first place. “Developer experience matters when it comes to driving native in-app experiences.” And this is where Knock thinks it may have a big advantage over incumbents in this market. Sealy said that while the company often prefers competitors walkable And customer.io The secret to that market, which are often sold to marketers, is that these devices are often used and maintained by engineers.
An interesting aspect of the Knock Tech stack: it is written in Nectar Language, which is not exactly mainstream. As it turns out, Bell has been very active in this community for a long time and even runs a Amrit Podcast, “When I think about the fit, in terms of what we’re building and the choice of language, there’s no better application in my mind to use than Elixir,” he explained. “Where it shines is the highly concurrent flaw-[tolerance] It brings to the table. When I think about what we’re doing here, the foundation of Erlang is written for telephony systems, which route calls from one place to another.
The company plans to deploy the new funding to expand its market efforts and, of course, grow its engineering team. Current customers include Vercel, Amplitude, Hive and Betterworks.
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