Weeks after raising $100M, investors pump another $180M into hot Indian startup MoEngage

MoEngage, a customer engagement platform used by consumer brands across 75 countries, has announced a $180 million Series F follow-on transaction just over a month after securing $100 million, with a majority of the latest funding providing liquidity to investors and employees through secondary transactions.

In the latest raise, about $123 million was secondary, including a $15 million employee tender that provided liquidity to 259 current and former employees, while the remaining $57 million was raised as primary capital and went into the business. The round was led by ChrysCapital and Dragon Funds, with participation from Schroders Capital and existing investors TR Capital and B Capital. Early backers, including Eight Roads Ventures, Helion Venture Partners, Z47, and Ventureast, sold shares in the secondary transactions.

The deal valued MoEngage at “well over” $900 million post-money, per a person close to the deal, who added that the startup was tracking toward $100 million in annualised recurring revenue this year. MoEngage did not disclose these figures.

MoEngage plans to use the fresh capital to invest further in its Merlin AI suite and expand its use of AI agents to improve decision-making and efficiency for marketing teams, said Raviteja Dodda (pictured above), co-founder and chief executive, in an interview. The startup is also pushing deeper into product and engineering teams by bundling its analytics and transactional messaging tools into a broader offering, a move it expects to lift average contract values and expand its addressable market.

“When you look at customer engagement, it is not necessarily focused on marketing teams. There are product and engineering teams, which also focus on how to make sense of customer behavior and data,” Dodda said.

MoEngage also plans to use part of its fresh capital raise to pursue strategic acquisitions, particularly in the U.S. and Europe, targeting software companies that complement its customer engagement platform or help accelerate its expansion in those markets. It also targets small AI teams to bolster its intelligence-led offerings.

The 11-year-old startup, which has its headquarters in Bengaluru and San Francisco, already gets more than 30% of its revenue from North America, about 25% from Europe and the Middle East, and the remaining 45% from India and Southeast Asia.

MoEngage’s secondary-heavy structure of the raise reflects its late-stage position, allowing early investors and employees to take liquidity without forcing the company into a near-term public listing. This approach gives MoEngage flexibility to choose its next steps based on business priorities rather than investor exit timelines.

“It gives us the opportunity not to have an urgency with regard to going IPO,” Dodda said, adding that the startup still aims to go public in a couple of years, depending on market conditions and other factors.

MoEngage expects to turn earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA) positive this quarter and is targeting compound annual growth of about 35% over the next three years, Dodda said.

Bhavin Turakhia, co-founder and chief executive of fintech firm Zeta, a MoEngage customer, said the startup’s analytics and messaging tools have helped it improve onboarding, activation, and cross-sell across key customer journeys.

The secondary component of the round also enabled some early investors to exit fully. Ventureast, which backed MoEngage in 2018, is one of them. The VC firm recorded a roughly 10-times return on its investment on a blended basis, its partner Vinay Rao told TechCrunch.

Rao said that while many global customer engagement companies operate with cost structures geared toward the U.S. market, MoEngage has retained an India-based cost structure, which he said has helped it compete more effectively in the U.S. while scaling the business.

With the latest round, MoEngage has raised about $307 million in primary funding to date. Avendus advised MoEngage for the transaction.