South Africa’s Mobiz Raises $4m To Expand Into The United States

South African mobile marketing startup Mobiz has raised $4 million in a pre-Series A round that saw the participation of Futuregrowth, Launch Africa, CapaciTech, Endeavor’s Harvest Fund, Allan Grey E-Squared Ventures and HAVAIC.

Mobiz is a startup integrating hyper-personalization into mobile marketing. Its product, which can be used by anyone as it does not require coding, can be used by enterprises, marketers, SMEs, and anyone without any marketing experience to create and send out campaigns to their customers.

According to CEO Greg Chen, “In South Africa and Africa general, there are a lot of companies using SMS marketing, but it’s not giving any value to them because they lack digital marketing skills. So we came to enable businesses to deliver personalized digital content via a personal landing page that can be built easily within the Mobiz platform and deliver on the SMS channel”. Founded in 2014 by Greg Chen who is the company’s CEO, Mobiz came into existence after noticing that businesses in South Africa had a challenge with targeting and engaging their customers and potential customers via SMS. Greg Chen is an expert in the mobile industry and has vast knowledge about how things in the industry work alongside vast years of experience.

The newly acquired fund will be used to strengthen the company’s ongoing efforts to expand to the US market. Part of the fund will be focused on the US expansion plan while the rest will be used to boost its operations in South Africa as well as hire more talents.

Currently, the company works with over 100 brands including big names like MultiChoice, HomeChoice, New Balance and Experian. According to what the company’s website reads, SMS delivered by the companies are read within a period of three minutes and have an open rate of 98 percent.

The messages send range from special offers and customer loyalty programs to ticket sales and crises communications. Mobiz is an established company in South Africa and has helped many businesses with their marketing strategies. Being able to establish itself in one of Africa’s toughest and biggest markets, Mobiz believes that it is ready to take on a new market outside of Africa. The company’s CEO made it known that the company sees huge potentials in US SMEs and that its product could take over the market. “How we’ve disrupted our space in South Africa, we see an opportunity over there. So we want to help many SMBs easily produce beautiful customer engagements that are personalized at scale to make them clickable within 10 minutes on their platforms. That’s our thesis and we are very hopeful that we will work out”, he said.

Mobiz plans on going live in the US with about 200 beta users that are already using its platform. In the coming months, after it would have entered the US market, Mobiz is expected to have its Series A round, the CEO intimated.