customer-engagement
(17)
Smart Communications
The London-born software company that turns the dull, high-stakes paperwork of insurers and banks into governed, on-brand conversations - and just changed hands for a reported $1.8 billion.
Khoros
Two decades after inventing the branded online community, the Austin software maker is betting that the millions of customer conversations it hosts are its real product - and that AI is how it finally reads them.
Gist
A better customer experience across support, marketing, and sales.
Chatwoot
AI assistant, omnichannel support desk, knowledge base. Everything you need for seamless customer support, all in one place.
Braze
The customer engagement platform that grew out of a hackathon now routes trillions of messages a year for brands from Burger King to the NBA - and it is betting its next chapter on AI agents that draft and send campaigns for marketers.
Bird
The Dutch company that rebuilt telecom's plumbing now carries a claimed 40% of the world's commercial messages - and spent two years trying to delete Twilio's margins with a 90% price cut. Bird's next bet is that the software placing those calls will be an AI agent, not a marketer.
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.
Diya Mathew
Diya Mathew is a Senior Manager for Customer Engagement Strategy in the Office of the President & COO at ServiceNow, the enterprise cloud platform company valued at over $100 billion. A graduate of Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and NIT Tiruchirappalli, she brings a rare blend of technical depth and strategic acumen forged across Cisco, Deloitte Consulting, Meta, and now ServiceNow. Based in San Francisco, she works at the intersection of executive strategy, customer engagement, and enterprise operations.
Samantha Mah
Samantha Mah is VP of Strategic Partnerships and Growth at ServiceNow, the $13B+ enterprise cloud platform company headquartered in Santa Clara. Based in Toronto, she leads the charge on unlocking organizational potential by eliminating manual, repetitive work through intelligent digital workflows. With a Six Sigma Master Black Belt background and a career that spans Xerox and ServiceNow, she brings process-excellence discipline to the art of enterprise partnerships. She also serves in the Office of the CDIO as Senior Director, Customer Advocate - bridging the gap between technology capability and human impact.
Registria
Registria runs the quiet half of consumer products: what happens after the box is opened. Its Ownership Experience Management (OXM) platform - anchored by Photoregister and Concierge - helps manufacturers like Whirlpool, Sony, LG, Bosch, and Cuisinart turn one-time buyers into identified, engaged, monetizable owners.
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.
Freshsales
Freshsales is the AI-powered CRM product from Freshworks (NASDAQ: FRSH), designed to help sales teams close deals faster without drowning in complexity. Built on the same philosophy that made Freshworks a $900M+ ARR public company - that business software should be delightfully simple - Freshsales combines lead scoring, built-in phone and chat, marketing automation, and Freddy AI into one platform starting at $9 per user per month. Over 67,000 businesses worldwide use Freshworks products, including NHS, Honda, Hugo Boss, and Cisco.
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.
Vanessa Thompson
Vanessa Thompson is the Vice President of Revenue and Growth Marketing at Twilio, where she leads a global team driving top-of-funnel growth across demand generation, lifecycle marketing, product marketing, competitive intelligence, and the developer network. A New Zealander who built her career through government tech, analyst research at IDC, and SaaS consulting at Bluewolf before joining Twilio in 2018, she has ascended from IoT marketing director to interim CMO and now oversees the full revenue marketing engine at one of the world's leading cloud communications platforms.
Wen Miao
Wen Miao is the co-founder and CEO of Lava.ai, a San Francisco-based company building real-time AI-powered customer engagement and loyalty platforms for sports teams, entertainment venues, and enterprise brands. Before Lava.ai, he was SVP and GM at TIBCO Software, where he led global client services and launched real-time predictive customer engagement platforms. Lava.ai counts Real Madrid, the LA Rams, the Sacramento Kings, and the Cleveland Browns among its clients, and has raised over $33.7M in funding. In 2015, Computerworld named Miao a Premier 100 IT Leader.
Dan Beltramo
Dan Beltramo is CEO of Registria, the post-purchase customer engagement platform built around Ownership Experience Management (OXM). A Stanford-trained serial entrepreneur, he previously co-founded Vizu - which pioneered real-time brand lift measurement in digital advertising before being acquired by Nielsen in 2012 - and co-founded Onclusive, growing it 80x through organic expansion and PE-backed acquisitions. With over 20 years leading data and analytics organizations across marketing, media, and communications technology, Beltramo brings a pattern-recognition edge built from Clorox brand tables, Silicon Valley startup floors, and boardrooms at global media conglomerates.
Stefanos Loukakos
Stefanos Loukakos is the Co-founder and CEO of Connectly.ai, a San Francisco-based AI conversational commerce platform that raised a $20M Series B led by Alibaba in September 2024, bringing total funding to $37.2M at ~$100M valuation. A native of Greece, he previously served as Head of Facebook Messenger Business and Director of Blockchain at Meta, and as Country Director of Google Greece. He built Connectly to let retailers sell through WhatsApp, Instagram, SMS, and web chat - turning customer messages into revenue.