The notification may appear to indicate that the issue has been resolved. After all, you've probably already gotten more than you wanted. His two founders at Knock, Sam Seeley and Chris Bell, argue that while many companies have solved the “last mile delivery problem”, there is still more work to be done. Products like Twilio and SendGrid may offer developer-friendly APIs, but the Knock founders believe that what's really needed is a combination of notification delivery with a comprehensive workflow engine and integrated observability tools. We believe that this is a more comprehensive solution.
Founded in 2021, the company today announced a $12 million funding round led by Craft Ventures. At launch, the company raised $6 million in a previously undisclosed seed round led by Afore Capital. Introduction Ventures, Worklife, Expa Ventures, Cofound Partners, and Tokyo Black also invested in these rounds, as did angel investors including Vercel co-founder and CEO Guillermo Rauch and Behance co-founder Scott Belsky. is.
Image credits: knock
“Now, if you're an engineering team for any kind of product, whether it's SaaS, developer tools, or consumer products, you have generic services that were previously built in-house, and now you have access to APIs. ” said Knock CEO Sam Seeley. “Right now, all the good engineers who want to work on payments work at Stripe. All the good people who want to work on search go to Algolia. The notification infrastructure part of this still has to be built in-house. I felt like it wasn't possible.”
Seely and Bell said they went back to the drawing board to consider what a modern notification system would look like and what primitives they would need to build. At the end of the day, notifications are not a differentiator for most products, but they are very necessary. So if a product like Knock can speed up your development workflow, it's a win-win.
Knock's real differentiator is that it not only provides tools to send notifications, but also ingests data from third-party tools that allow developers to trigger specified workflow logic for specific use cases (such as message translation). is. For example, a global audience).
Image credits: knock
“We have a whole workflow engine, which is really the core of the product,” Seely explained. “Here we define when some trigger happens. We call the Knock API, run this workflow, batch messages with this cadence, adjust the messages so the user doesn't get spammed, and then , send this in-app message, and send this email message.”
The workflow engine is accessible through a web-based user interface, but as the team highlighted, all of this functionality is also available programmatically. “A big focus for us is taking a workflow engine that drives cross-channel engagement and incorporating it into the daily developer workflow,” Seeley said.
Over time, Knock also plans to move deeper into the customer engagement space. The team claims that every time a new channel emerges, existing players in the space, such as SAP's Exact Target, struggle to keep up.
“Users are becoming tired of the onslaught and waves of emails and push notifications,” Seeley said. “It is a true native product experience that brings value to users and helps businesses drive engagement and retention, the whole reason we send notifications in the first place. To drive a native in-app experience, Developer experience matters.'' And that's where Nok believes it has a big advantage over incumbents in this market. Seely said that at his company, competitors like Iterable and his Customer.io are often sold to marketers, but the secret to that market is that these tools are used and maintained primarily by engineers. He pointed out that this is something that is often done.
One of the interesting things about the Knock tech stack is that it is written in the Elixir language. The Elixir language is not necessarily mainstream. As it turns out, Bell has been very active in this community for a long time and also runs the Elixir podcast. “When you think about suitability, in terms of what we're building and language choices, there's no better application in my mind for using Elixir,” he explained. “What's great about this product is the high degree of concurrent fault tolerance it provides. If you think about what we're doing here, the fundamentals of Erlang were written for telephone systems. Route calls from one location to another.”
The company plans to use the new funding to expand its go-to-market efforts and, of course, grow its engineering team. Current customers include Vercel, Amplitude, Hiive, Betterworks, and more.