“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning,” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once said. The realisation reflects a structural truth of today’s digital economy, where acquiring users is easy, but retaining them is both expensive and complex. In fact, multiple studies have found that retention can call for anything between five and 25 times the cost of acquisition, making engagement and loyalty central to long-term profitability. This economic paradox inspired Raviteja Dodda and Yashwanth Kumar to conjure up MoEngage as a customer engagement platform, using behavioural analytics, cross-channel orchestration, and AI-driven tools to help brands improve retention, lifetime value, and repeat transactions. After raising $280 Mn in Series F funding last year, crossing nearly $100 Mn in annual recurring revenue (ARR), and claiming profitability in the October-December quarter, MoEngage is now gearing up to hit Dalal Street. Its recent reverse flip from the US to India highlights the IPO plan. The startup’s evolution from early entrepreneurial failure to a scaled global SaaS platform shows how retention economics can be converted into a defensible business model. Reaching The Retention-First Thesis MoEngage has its roots in the engineering and entrepreneurial instincts of the two cofounders. Dodda and Kumar saw the… Read MoreInc42 Media
