Knak, the first codeless campaign creation platform built for enterprise marketing teams, announced the close of a $25 million Series A round led by New York-based global private equity and venture capital firm Insight Partners.
Knak will use the funding to accelerate its growth by adding to its team, establishing a channel program, expanding its platform, and increasing industry awareness. The company has already helped hundreds of global companies such as Citrix, Databricks, DISH Network, Slack, and two of the three largest pharmaceutical companies in the world significantly reduce the time spent on branded email and landing page creation to support their marketing campaigns.
Working seamlessly with top marketing automation platforms (MAPs) such as Adobe Marketo Engage, Oracle Eloqua, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Knak eliminates coding constraints for thousands of enterprise marketers around the globe. Its easy-to-use, drag-and-drop SaaS platform helps marketers bring emails and landing pages to market in minutes or hours instead of days or weeks and scales with their enterprise needs, setting the standard for codeless campaign creation platforms.
“Our digital campaign demands continue to grow, but finding the team, time, and budget to manage coding headaches felt like a difficult task before we found Knak,” noted Elizabeth Dobbs, senior director of marketing at Databricks. “Trying to ensure everything worked seamlessly with our marketing automation platform and rendered flawlessly across all screens was slow and costly. We can get new campaigns up and running in hours instead of days or weeks while ensuring brand consistency across our global, decentralised teams.”
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Enterprise marketers spend countless hours and tens of thousands of dollars on branded emails and landing pages to feed into their MAPs – a market expected to hit $25.1 billion by 2023 – and the associated coding constraints can severely hamper marketing campaign efforts, whether they have the right in-house resources or have to rely on an agency team. While working together at IBM, Knak Co-Founders Pierce Ujjainwalla (CEO) and Brendan Farnand (COO) experienced these problems first hand and set out to help others overcome the same frustrations. Since 2015, Knak has become one of the fastest-growing software start-ups in Canada by helping enterprise marketers quickly create beautiful, on-brand emails and landing pages in minutes, without the need for coding or outside help.
“With its ability to integrate with the most popular marketing automation platforms being used by businesses around the globe, Knak has securely positioned itself as a leader in codeless creation,” said Philine Huizing, vice president at Insight Partners. “The clear product-market fit of Knak’s platform, impressive leadership and delighted customers make the company a force to be reckoned with in the martech landscape. Insight looks forward to supporting Knak’s continued growth.” Huizing will join Knak’s Board of Directors.
“I am proud of our team’s bootstrapped journey from an idea in my basement to a formidable martech force boasting massive customer and revenue growth each year thanks to an incredibly talented team across Canada. Our unwavering dedication to building a product-first, customer-led company has helped us become the go-to platform for codeless digital campaign creation,” said Knak Co-Founder and CEO Pierce Ujjainwalla. “Insight Partners stood out as our ideal investment partner because the firm believes in our vision and has the software experience and extensive SaaS technology network to help us fulfil it. With the support of Insight Partners, I’m confident Knak has the capital, operating guidance, and connections needed to scale our business and meet the growing market demand successfully.”
Recently recognised as one of Canada’s top growing companies and one of Ottawa’s top ten places to work, Knak plans to double down on team expansion and product development over the next year and has an entire pipeline of platform enhancements.
