Forging a fruitful brand-customer connection is right up Braze’s alley, the rookie-turned-Goliath of marketing.

Today, digital marketing is an essential tool for online business; every major company needs a multichannel tool to present its products to the public. Three entrepreneurs decided to take it to another level and forged the idea for a perfect multichannel platform called Braze.

Bill Magnuson, Jon Hyman, and Mark Ghermezian are the founders of Braze, a cloud-based software company that creates a bond between the brands and their customers. Primarily, this platform is used by high-scaled businesses for multichannel marketing while bringing massive exposure to the brand.

Founded in 2011, Braze has enjoyed rapid success with each year passed.

How did three fellow entrepreneurs come up with such an innovative idea to create the perfect multi-marketing channel tool? What was the driving force behind this idea? All of that and more will be revealed in this story of Bill, Jon, and Mark, the brazen creators of Braze.

Great Minds Think Alike

One of the three founders of Braze, Jon Hyman, has always been interested in marketing and was determined to create something that all companies can use.

Jon always believed that every major player in the business should expose itself for better communication with its clients.

Prior to founding Braze as a multichannel marketing tool, Jon was working as the lead engineer at the Core Technology Group at Bridgewater Associates, which is known as the world’s largest hedge fund. There, Jon maintained over 80 software assets alongside his team.

While working at Core Technology Group, Jon met with Bill, who will later help him to create Braze. The two young men quickly became friends and decided to start their own business venture.

Working for the same company for some time wasn’t all that fulfilling for the restless venture adventurers. After some time, Jon and Bill decided that enough was enough, and both left Core Technology Group. Geared up with the funds earned throughout the years, the duo quickly started working on their new undertaking - a new multichannel marketing platform for major businesses.

Jon’s idea was to create a platform where businesses can make better contact with their customers, all the while exploiting the benefits of the worldwide market.

Blueprinting the Idea

Jon, along with Bill, who has been working on Google’s App and Android OS, has started working on Braze as soon as both of them left their previous employer.

Along the way, another fellow entrepreneur was incorporated into the team when Mark joined the partnership. Jon, Bill, and Mark set their minds to design a platform where businesses could improve the relations between the brands and their customers. With Braze, the idea was to make a stronger connection and more sustainable relationship with utilizing technology in the process.

Since all involved members of the team had previous experience with customers in their corporate jobs, the journey toward establishing their names in the fast-paced world of marketing wasn’t deemed complicated.

However, even with the vast experience of the trio led by Jon, the first steps were not flawless. First of all, cooperating with big companies is quite a tall order to fill, mainly because Braze was still a rookie company. Braze struggled to find a major corporation, to begin with. At that point, the trio’s experience kicked in, and they suddenly stumbled upon some smaller companies to test their new product on.

Jon’s initial name from the company was Appboy, but it seemed rather childish, and the partners decided to go with something more severe like Braze. All three team members agreed that Braze it is!

Attention! Braze’s Has Taken Over the Market!

Jon’s idea was to design a multi-marketing tool to ease the connection between the sellers and their customers. Realizing it might be the ideal solution to improve the company’s marketing capability, Braze was going to do its best to present its tool to potential clients.

After some time, Jon’s Braze received an unexpected offer from Burger King; the royals of the fast-food chains asked Braze to create a campaign for its Whopper burger, and it turned out to be more than successful. Jon and his team worked on the Whopper campaign and helped Burger King spread even more than before.

Shortly after the successful campaign with Burger King, the fast-food giant witnessed a 53.7% increase in monthly active users (MAU). Furthermore, Jon’s company helped Burger King to also increase the number of app users to 3.2 million and increase their user charing location data by a whopping 143%!

In August 2017, Braze received its first major funding in Series D, worth $50 million. It was the initial financial boost that Jon and his partners needed to further develop their newly launched product.

One of the best deals that Jon and his partners struck is the one with Shopify. As one of the leading online stores, Shopify’s popularity grew enormous thanks to Braze and its innovative customer engagement platform. Braze helped Shopify’s customers have better communication with the sellers, and the company gained unexpectedly more new customers!

Brace Yourselves! Braze Is Here!

For any product to be successful from the start, it needs to attract customers, and that’s that. Understandably, the first users of the Braze app were regular customers willing to better communicate with their favorite brands.

Unexpectedly, the word of Braze spread fast over the internet as the first customers spread the news of the quality service it offers. Jon and his team were happy that Braze worked out great, and there was no need to rework the app at that time.

The platform reached some prominent companies that realized Braz’s potential as time went on. One of the first major companies that started to use Braze was NASCAR. The popular race organizer in the United States witnessed an increase in several fields of its industry. For instance, once NASCAR started using Braze, it witnessed a 40% increase in conversion rate for rich push campaigns while promoting virtual racing.

Furthermore, the Android open rate increased by 9%, while the iOS one rose up to 4%.

Once other companies saw what Jon and his team were capable of, the product went global, and there was no going back from that!

Brazing the Communication of Today

Today, more than 1000 brands are empowered by Braze in over 50 countries worldwide. An interesting fact is that over 1 trillion messages are being sent over Braze, on average, in one year.

As of 2021, the company holds eight global offices, and more than 1000 employees worldwide. Today, Jon is a CTO whereas Bill and Mark operate as the company’s CEOs, still holding their positions as the company’s founders.

Braze is going strong with cooperating with well-known companies such as Domino’s Pizza, Burger King, Venmo, HeadSpace, and many others.

Nowadays, Braze counts over 800 employees worldwide in offices in San Francisco, Chicago, Tokyo, Singapore, and a few others located in major economic centers around the world. Braze’s headquarters are in New York, keeping up with the pace of the growing marketing industry.

On November 16th, 2021, the company announced its price for its initial public offering, which was set to $65.00 per share. The total offering of the Class A share was around 8,000,000, which is solid proof that the trio’s company reached its highest and is doing better than ever. Shortly after, Braze received $175.1 million funding in Series E round type, and the 2021 revenue hit an enormous $223.0 million.

Now, after repelling the competition coming from companies like Iterable, MoEngage, and OneSignal, Braze remains the sole leader in the comprehensive engagement sphere, enhancing the customer-brand interaction.

Brace yourselves, as Braze is expected to grow in the upcoming years as more and more companies turn to it for better communication and exposure.