Customer engagement platform Beamer raises $20M

Beamer, a no-code platform to build tools for measuring and monitoring product engagement, last week announced that it received a $20 million investment from Camber Partners, Beamer’s first outside round of funding.

Newly appointed CEO Satya Ganni says that the proceeds will be put toward building additional product lines targeted at product managers and marketers and driving the growth of Beamer’s existing solutions. That’ll include AI-related developments and use cases, but Ganni declined to provide more info.

“With customers like Atlassian, Freshworks, Hotjar, MongoDB, Unbounce, CloudKitchens, Linktree and Zenefits, Beamer’s mission is to help companies all across the globe build better products,” he told TechCrunch via email. “Beamer serves thousands of brands across the U.S., EU and Asia.”

Founded in 2017 by Mariano Rodriguez and Spencer Coon, Beamer aims to help teams building apps, services and software to highlight new capabilities, prioritize what to build next and collect feedback from users.

Beamer provides a changelog and notification center where developers can announce product updates and publish a roadmap that visualizes upcoming features. Using Beamer, customers can capture comments and reactions from users and try to measure a user’s loyalty over time.

Beamer’s business has benefited from an industry-wide shift in focus to customer retention, says Camber Partners founder and managing partner Scott Irwin. To his point, a recent survey from OneSignal, a customer engagement platform, found that 95% of product and marketing experts believe retention is either “very important” or “somewhat important” to their businesses.

The reason? It’s nearly a surefire way to boost revenue — an attractive proposition in an unsteady economy. According to research done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company, increasing retention by 5% can increase profits by 25% to 95%.

“We’ve observed a compelling shift in the software landscape,” Irwin said via email. “Product managers are increasingly leaning on tools to make data-driven decisions and our investment in Beamer is grounded in this observation. Their platform’s potential, particularly in user segmentation, aligns perfectly with our vision for a more integrated product management toolkit.”

Beamer competes with a number of product engagement platforms on the market, including Batch, which raised $23 million in 2021. Mordor Intelligence anticipates that the sector for customer engagement solutions will be worth $33.11 billion in 2028, up from $19.73 billion in 2023.

Ganni, though, expressed confidence in Beamer’s ability to remain competitive.

“Our core mission at Beamer has been to help companies across the globe build better products,” he said. “With Camber’s investment and partnership, we see a strong opportunity to expand our offering and further enhance the value of our platform.”

Certainly, Camber’s investment is bucking the macroeconomic trend — a strong show of confidence in Beamer’s future. Venture capital investment in Q2 2023 dropped to $29.4 billion, down from $44.4 billion in Q1 2023 — a decline of 34%.

San Francisco-based Beamer has a team of 13 people. Seeking to be conservative in its operating expenses, the startup doesn’t have plans to hire within the next year.