customer-data-platform
(10)
Optimove
The Israeli-born CRM marketing company spent a decade teaching brands to talk to customers one at a time. Now it wants to dissolve the marketing org chart entirely.
Lucidya | لوسيديا
Lucidya is a Riyadh-based, AI-native customer experience management (CXM) platform built for Arabic-speaking markets. Using a proprietary Arabic NLP engine that understands 15+ dialects with roughly 92% sentiment accuracy, it unifies social listening, media monitoring, surveys, customer profiles and omnichannel support into a single system, and now deploys autonomous AI agents for customer-facing roles. Founded in 2016 by Abdullah Asiri and co-founders, the company serves enterprises and governments across the MENA region and in 2025 raised a $30M Series B, one of the largest AI funding rounds in Saudi Arabia.
Bikky
Bikky is a customer data platform built exclusively for large, multi-unit restaurant brands. It unifies data from point-of-sale systems, online ordering, payments, and loyalty programs into a single guest view, letting operators measure how every marketing, menu, and operational decision affects guest behavior, frequency, and lifetime value. Founded in 2017 and based in New York City, Bikky serves brands like Bojangles, Dave's Hot Chicken, MOD Pizza, and Robeks across thousands of locations.
Twilio
Twilio is a cloud communications company that gives software developers programmable APIs to add messaging, voice, email, video, and authentication to their applications. Founded in 2008 and headquartered in San Francisco, it has grown from a pay-as-you-go SMS and voice API into a broad customer-engagement platform that pairs those channels with Segment's customer data platform and a growing set of AI-driven tools. Twilio is publicly traded on the NYSE under the ticker TWLO and serves developers and enterprises across nearly every industry.
Brevo
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is a Paris-based all-in-one customer engagement platform serving 500,000+ businesses across 180 countries. The platform combines email marketing, SMS, CRM, live chat, and marketing automation under one roof — all priced by email volume rather than contact count. Founded in 2012 by Armand Thiberge, Brevo rebranded from Sendinblue in 2023 to reflect its evolution from an email tool into a full customer lifecycle platform. In December 2025 it achieved unicorn status after raising €500 million in a Series C round led by General Atlantic and Oakley Capital, with a valuation exceeding €1 billion.
Nicholas Kontopoulos
Nicholas Kontopoulos is the Vice President of Marketing for Asia Pacific & Japan at Twilio, the cloud communications platform. Based in Singapore, he brings over 30 years of marketing and business leadership experience across APAC, with prior senior roles at Adobe (DX), SAP, Magento, and Capita. A recognized thought leader in customer experience and AI-driven marketing, he is a frequent speaker, published author, and LinkedIn Power Profile holder known for challenging marketing orthodoxy across the region.
Hightouch
Hightouch is a San Francisco-based B2B SaaS company that pioneered Reverse ETL and built the leading Composable Customer Data Platform (CDP). Founded in 2018 by Tejas Manohar, Josh Curl, and Kashish Gupta - all alumni of Segment - Hightouch lets companies activate their warehouse data directly into 250+ business tools like Salesforce, Braze, and Google Ads without copying data to a separate CDP. Since launching AI Decisioning in 2024, Hightouch has evolved into an agentic marketing platform, helping brands like Warner Music Group, Chime, PetSmart, and Spotify orchestrate personalized customer journeys using live warehouse data. The company reached $100M ARR and a $2.75B valuation in April 2026, backed by Goldman Sachs, Bain Capital Ventures, and Sapphire Ventures.
Bryson Koehler
Bryson Koehler is the CEO of Revinate, a hospitality SaaS company specializing in guest data platforms, CRM, and marketing automation for hotels. A career technology executive with deep roots in enterprise data and cloud infrastructure, Koehler previously served as CTO at IBM Watson & Cloud Platform and as EVP/Chief Technology, Product, Data & Analytics Officer at Equifax. He built the legendary Weather Company data platform - processing 4GB of data per second from 40 million mobile devices - before IBM acquired it in 2016 partly due to his work. His return to hospitality with Revinate merges two career obsessions: data engineering at scale and the guest experience.
Chris O'Neill
Chris O'Neill is a veteran technology executive with 25+ years of leadership across Google, Evernote, Glean, and Xero. Best known for leading Evernote's turnaround as CEO (2015-2018) and doubling its user base, he joined GrowthLoop as CEO in August 2024, steering the composable CDP startup through its AI transformation and Series D funding. A Tuck School of Business (Dartmouth) MBA and former Google Canada Managing Director who scaled that business to billions in revenue, O'Neill is also a board director at Gap Inc. and a published contributor to Fast Company and Fortune on the themes of AI, leadership, and compound growth.
Ilya Volodarsky
Ilya Volodarsky co-founded Segment in 2011 with MIT dorm-mates, building it from a failed classroom tool into the definitive customer data platform before selling to Twilio for $3.2 billion in 2020. After nine years scaling Segment to 600 employees, he pivoted to the problem of catastrophic wildfires, co-founding Wildfires.org and joining Convective Capital as a partner to back early-stage climate and healthcare startups.