Releva, the Bulgarian AI-powered marketing, and Revenue Operations (RevOps) platform for e-commerce businesses closed an $870K seed round led by New Vision 3 (NV3), with the participation of HR Capital, Verto Invest, and several business angels. The company plans to use the investment to grow its team, further streamline the development of its platform, and aggressively expand on the internal market.
“We believe that demand for marketing automation SaaS solutions is going to significantly increase as e-commerce businesses need to respond to the increasing online channel penetration and, in turn, greater competition for e-commerce market share would require more differentiation in this field. Releva’s customer data platform and technology are exceptionally well-positioned to deliver superior customer experience and higher ROI for merchants,” Aleksandar Terziyski, Partner at New Vision 3, shares in a press release.
“The development of the e-commerce sector is undoubtedly one of the most exciting trends in the digital economy and that is why it is among the main focuses of our investments in HR Capital. More and more e-commerce leaders will need tech solutions based on AI to help them automate their processes and scale their business rapidly,” Hristo Hristov, CEO of HR Capital, adds.
Product for the growth of small and medium e-commerce businesses
Founded in 2019 by software engineers and data scientists Georgi Georgiev (CEO) and Yavor Stoychev (CTO), the goal of RevOps platform Releva is to enable the fast growth of online commerce businesses. The main vision of the founders was to make marketing automation less complicated for brand owners by providing them with the right tools.
“At the beginning, for both Yavor and myself, it all started as a side project that we developed parallel to working full-time. Prior to officially establishing the company, we did a pilot project with two big local e-commerce players which we helped with marketing recommendations. These were the sports e-commerce store Sport Depot and the Bulgaria-founded online-delivery app eBag. After the pilot, they became our first paying customers and this came as a testimonial for the validated use case and the growth potential of Releva,” Georgi Georgiev, CEO and co-founder of Releva, shares for The Recursive.
The product uses data analytics on customer behavior to maximize the effective and ethical communication between online merchants and their customers. Therefore, by helping brand owners and marketers develop deep and empathetic connections with buyers, Releva increases the revenue and conversion rates of e-commerce businesses.
With the help of AI, the platform can also make real-time predictions on what the next purchase of a customer will be, and send automatic personalized messages on various channels. These forecasting capabilities of Releva, help e-commerce businesses optimize their supply chains.
“The main USP that differentiates Releva from other RevOps marketing automation companies is that our solution is able to make recommendations to users before they even enter the sales funnel, and before becoming clients with known preferences and behaviors. In addition, Releva can forecast what these clients will put in their online shopping carts,” Georgiev explains.
Marketing automation reimagined
Having bootstrapped their development up to this point, the co-founders of Releva aim to use the raised external capital from the seed round to expand beyond the local market. In addition, they plan to more than double their team from 8 employees at the moment to almost 20 people by the end of the year.
Currently, the team of Releva is in the process of developing and implementing solutions that merge sales and marketing operations, payments, growth KPIs and analytics, forecasting technologies, and financing opportunities. In terms of RevOps product, Releva will be looking to make a tiering of its offering and address the needs of small e-commerce brands by integrating with Shopify. They also plan to add Google and Facebook targeting automation to allow businesses to reach more customers and increase the financial impact of revenue maximization.
Having such ambitious growth plans, the CEO of Releva shares that if everything goes as planned and the company achieves the set targets, the team will be looking to close a substantial Series A round in the next year.
