Arena: Market Conditions Before Iterable
Marketing teams at growing consumer internet companies · 2013 · United States
Barriers to participationDisconnected workflows
In 2013 a marketing team at a growing consumer internet company that wanted to message users based on what they did had two kinds of choice. The marketing clouds sold by Oracle and Salesforce were built and priced for large enterprises, and smaller companies lacked the resources to run them; simpler email tools lacked the segmentation and automation the job needed IT1. The largest consumer companies, such as Twitter, built their own growth systems in-house IT11. For everyone else, the customer data sat with engineers, and launching an email or push campaign aimed at a behavior meant filing a request and waiting BRZ-8 IT8. Smartphones were adding push and in-app channels to a job most teams still ran through email.
How each step happened
Step 1 of 5 · 2013–15
An email platform for smaller marketers
Iterable started from email and from the marketer's side of the problem. Justin Zhu and Andrew Boni, engineers from Twitter and Google, founded it in March 2013 after seeing that smaller companies could not get the resources needed to work with the large marketing clouds IT1. In early 2015 the product was an email platform with A/B testing, personalization and campaigns triggered by customer behavior; push notifications were still a plan BRZ-4.
The founders learned to sell by doing it. Boni practiced pitching until the first users agreed to try the product, before any of them paid IT1. "Customer success was really the first team we focused on growing at the company," he says IT1. Its marketers needed a working campaign, not just software, and helping each account launch one made an engineering product something a small team could buy. In 2015 recurring revenue grew more than tenfold and customers eightfold, and Iterable was cash-flow positive in the fourth quarter IT12. The starting point also fixed the order of what came next: email first, with mobile channels to be added to it.
Rivals Braze was founded as Appboy in 2011 on the bet that apps would become a main customer channel; its first SDK, code built into a customer's app, recorded in-app behavior and sent push, email, news feed and slide-up messages B2 BRZ-1.
Focus Strategy
Step 2 of 5 · 2015–19
Campaigns marketers could run without engineers
Iterable's product choice was to let marketers do alone what had needed engineers. By January 2016 it let them segment hundreds of millions of users, personalize messages, build behavioral workflows and A/B test any part of a campaign across email, push and SMS IT12. Marketers did it "without engineering support", the company said IT11. In 2019 it added Catalog, a store of product and other data marketers could place in templates, to its Workflow Studio journey editor IT2.
Box shows the job done well. Its small customer engagement team had to reach tens of millions of end users IT10. It built an onboarding series triggered by milestones such as first login, pulled in Salesforce data through Iterable's APIs, and automated the exchange of templates with its translation vendor; translation ran five times faster, and an A/B test against the old welcome series showed a 10% rise in user adoption IT10. Iterable sold the marketer's whole workflow, from data to campaign. Braze sold the same benefit: at REA Group, Braze fed by the Tealium customer data platform let marketers run real-time personalized campaigns without waiting on other teams for data BR2. The workflow won accounts, but it was not something a rival lacked.
Rivals Braze built its own stream processor for mobile-scale event volume and an abstraction layer that decides what to send before choosing the channel BRZ-2; its segments update in real time as data arrives B1.
End-to-End Workflow
Step 3 of 5 · 2016–24
Channels and data added one at a time
Iterable reached mobile by adding channels to its campaign platform. Push and SMS were in the product by January 2016, and in-app messages arrived in December 2016, fitting, the company said, into the same real-time segmentation, templates, workflow automation and A/B testing IT12 IT11. By 2019 web push and direct mail had joined them IT2. Embedded messages inside apps and websites followed in 2024, displayed through its mobile and web SDKs, and WhatsApp became a native channel the same year IT4 IT3. Each channel gave customers another place to use the segments and campaigns they had already built.
Data came the same way. Customer data often sat in cloud warehouses behind engineering backlogs, so in January 2024 Iterable announced Smart Ingest, co-developed with Hightouch and offered at no additional cost, to connect warehouses to Iterable directly IT8. It entered beta in March 2024 and reached all customers in May IT4 IT3. Each addition extended the campaign tool Iterable had built in step 2; none gave it a way into customers' apps that Braze did not already have.
Rivals Braze ships new messaging features through the SDK already in customers' apps with little or no work on their side, and each new channel gets every existing feature at launch B1. Half of its customers used its own warehouse import, Cloud Data Ingestion, by March 2026 BRZ-5.
End-to-End Workflow
Step 4 of 5 · 2013–25
Growth marketers first, large enterprises later
The choice of buyer made at founding ran under every step above, which is why this step's dates span them: Iterable sold to growth marketers at fast-moving consumer companies IT12. Zillow chose it as its core marketing CRM and messaging platform in 2016, and later customers included DoorDash and SeatGeek IT11 BRZ-8 IT5. Recurring revenue rose more than 400% in the year after the January 2016 Series A IT11. In May 2021 the board replaced Zhu as chief executive with Boni, whose stated aim was to give every marketer, "regardless of technical skill or business size", a way to reach customers IT6 BRZ-8. In June it was valued at $2 billion BRZ-8.
The company grew into a large business on the market it chose in 2013. In February 2024 it reported more than $200 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) from over 1,200 customers in 54 countries, and had opened a Dublin data center for Europe IT5. The push toward the largest accounts came late. In July 2025, still citing that ARR figure, Iterable named Sam Allen, a Salesforce executive, chief executive to expand its enterprise business, and Boni became chief scientist BRZ-9. By then Braze had spent a decade selling to large brands whose spend grew with their users and channels.
Rivals Braze turned to marketers at established brands between 2013 and 2015 BRZ-1 and bills on committed monthly active users and message volume B1. At its 2021 listing 41 customers paid over $1M a year BRZ-6; in fiscal 2026 revenue was $738.2M, with 333 customers above $500,000 and 65.5% of revenue growth from existing customers B1.
Focus Strategy
Step 5 of 5 · 2024–26
Kept its customers; Braze kept the larger ones
Once a customer engagement platform is installed, moving is costly in either direction. Braze's own filing says prospects can find its platform too difficult to migrate to B1. Iterable's customers built the same kind of dependence: its SDKs sat in their apps for in-app and embedded messages, its data flowed into their Snowflake accounts, and some brands stayed for years IT4 IT8. "SeatGeek has been a loyal Iterable customer since 2016," its CRM director said in 2024 IT5.
The barrier protected each vendor's installed base, and Braze's base was the larger and bigger-spending one. In March 2026 over 90% of Braze customers ran its SDK and 80% sent their data out through its Currents export BRZ-5. The email-first start from step 1 had put Iterable with growth-stage companies while Braze was signing large brands and putting its code in their apps; winning those accounts later meant asking each to rip that code out. Iterable now serves over 1,200 brands, led by an enterprise sales executive BRZ-9. It lost this comparison on where it started, not on how it served the customers it had.
Rivals Braze listed nine migrations from legacy platforms in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026, among them a department store chain and a large Latin American bank BRZ-5. Its net dollar retention fell from 125% at the 2021 listing to 109% in fiscal 2026, which it attributes to customer turnover and lower renewals BRZ-6 B1.