INTERVIEW: MoEngage, which helps companies like Domino's engage with customers, wants an office in New York and 150 techies in India

• Customer engagement platform MoEngage is planning to go big on international expansion in the one year.
• MoEngage recently closed a $32 million funding round led by Multiples Alternate Asset Management.
• A part of the funding will be used to set up an R&D center in Hyderabad due to the talent pool crunch in Bengaluru.

MoEngage, which helps companies like Domino's engage with their customers, is planning to go big on international expansion in the one year.

It has already set up local offices in the UK, Germany and Vietnam over the last one year, and cities like New York and Boston are next in line.

The company aims to touch annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $100 million in the next three years, by 2024. Though MoEngage did not share their current ARR, the company claimed that it is higher than $20 million. This would mean that the company is looking to expand five fold in the next three years.

The company has also decided to set up another research and development (R&D) center in Hyderabad, MoEngage’s chief executive officer (CEO) Raviteja Dodda said in an exclusive interaction with Business Insider. Currently, it has one R&D center in Bengaluru.

These R&D centers are like the backend of any software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, where the products are actually developed and designed.

Several SaaS companies even if they cater to customers in the western market, set up R&D centers in India due to the massive talent pool and cheap workforce. Some prominent examples are Freshworks, Zoho Corp and Browserstack.

“New office in Hyderabad is to expand the talent pool. Hiring is a big problem right now, across every company. And if you are based in Bengaluru, it's even a bigger problem to hire people. So we are expanding our talent pools that we target,” Dodda said.

MoEngage’s four step international expansion strategies
MoEngage’s aggressive international expansion, comes with aggressive hiring

MoEngage — which was founded by IIT Kharagpur alumnus Raviteja Dodda and Yashwanth Kumar — plans to hire over 150 employees across verticals and functions in the next 12-18 months, by the end of 2022. This is in addition to 120 employees hired across vertices in the last seven months. MoEnagange currently has a team of 375 employees.

Key hires in last 12 months
For international markets, MoEngage has focused on hiring for sales, marketing and customer acquisition teams. Whereas Indian hiring has largely focused on product, engineering and other functions. Though the company hasn’t put a number on how many people it plans to hire for its Hyderabad R&D office, it can be expected to be higher than 20.

The Bengaluru and San Francisco-based startup would also be looking at acquisitions in the next two to three years to expand its product range and distribution channels. “It will be either for distribution in markets where we want to expand in or products which are complementary to what we do and can add value for our customers,” Dodda added.

Closing 2021 with another 200 customers

MoEngage startup recently closed a $32.5 million funding round led by Multiples Alternate Asset Management to aid its ambitious international plans. Overall, the seven-year-old startup has raised over $73.3 million since its inception.

The company has a user base of 1000 customers, of which 250 were on boarded in the last one year.
Dodda claims that they are adding over 90 customers every quarter and it expects to close this year with another 200 customers.

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