• by Ray Schultz , June 2, 2020

MessageGears, a customer marketing platform serving enterprise brands, has secured $12 million in funding, bringing its total financing to $20 million.

The round was led by new investors Argenturn and Bridge Bank. Walter H. Barandiarán, managing partner at Argentum, has joined the MessageGears board. 

“It was the right time to get equity with great partners to help build the business from the go-to-market perspective,” says MessageGears CEO Roger Barnette.

MessageGears will use the new money to “continue to hire internally and invest in sales and marketing,” Barnette adds. “We’re also going to invest in engineering and product.”

The Atlanta-based firm now employs about 50 people. 

Barnette says email marketing is still on a growth curve. 

“What our customers are telling us is that email is the most important communication channel--now more than ever,” he says. 

Barnette adds, “they’re cutting back in other areas — email is where they’re leaning in.”

But many marketing teams still face barriers to using their data effectively. “There’s massive friction between where data lives and the tools they use for massaging,” Barnette observes.

In January, MessageGears launched Engage, a tool that allows brands to access internal customer and offer data without IT involvement.

In April, it debuted Segment, a product to help marketers create audiences across email, mobile push and SMS, using their customer data.

The MessageGears platform connects to such data warehouses as Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift and Microsoft Azure, the firm says.

MessageGears serves such brands as Expedia, Rakuten Rewards, Chick-fil-A, T-Mobile and OpenTable. 

Recently, digital marketing agency Havas Helia selected MessageGears as its preferred email and direct marketing provider, and said it will promote the MesageGears platform to its client base.