Courier Raised a $35M Series B to Make Notifications Delightful

We’re excited to announce that we’ve raised $35M to provide engineering teams with fantastic notification infrastructure! The round was led by GV with participation from our existing investors at Bessemer Venture Partners and Matrix Partners.

“Courier is building the future of notification infrastructure. The company has a fast-growing set of customers with a need to provide the best possible notification experience. GV is thrilled to lead Courier's Series B and partner with Troy Goode and the entire executive team as they deliver on an unparalleled approach to software notifications." - Sangen Zeb, GV

Courier’s vision is to be a single source of truth of all of the end-user’s notifications. We aim to bring together all notifications, whether they may be from mobile, email, Slack, or any other channel, to a single point of easy access to lift the burden of improving the notification experience from the end-user.

The next incremental step on this road is to begin to improve mobile notifications. According to a Courier survey of 157 notification recipients, respondents are more likely to engage with a smartphone notification than a text, email, push, or in-app notification. Our first goal for our Series B, therefore, is to improve the user experience of mobile notifications and we are starting down this path today by announcing new advanced mobile notification capabilities for our platform. Check out the video below to learn more about our new mobile offerings!

A new category of software: Notification Infrastructure

Every piece of software in the world sends notifications, and just about every software team has had to build the infrastructure needed to deliver those notifications in-house. This ubiquitous need for notification infrastructure demands its own category of software, which gives developers the option to use a third party API instead of building an entirely new notification system from scratch.

As a former engineer and engineering executive, I’ve experienced the pain involved with building and scaling notification infrastructure too many times. Every time I was tasked with building a new notification system for a new product, I wished there was a service I could reach for to free up my engineering team and avoid the future headache that I knew would follow.

The lack of this type of solution is what drove me to found Courier.

Courier delivers notification infrastructure to our customers as SaaS. At the center of our product is an API designed for engineering teams. This API allows developers to send notifications across any channel as well as manage user data, preferences, notification workflows, and more. In addition to the API, we provide a web Studio that allows our customers to easily design omni-channel notifications, view logs across notification channels, and providers, as well as visually build out notification workflows.

We’ve come a long way over the last three years, both as a company and a product, thanks in large part to our customers. Courier is used by hundreds of fantastic software companies such as New Relic, LaunchDarkly, Lattice, and Uservoice. These companies have partnered with Courier to deliver a better product experience to their users while dramatically reducing the amount of time and money spent on building and maintaining their own internal notification infrastructure.

“Before Courier, we were spending tons of time integrating with every delivery platform every time a customer requested a new connection from us. But now it’s as easy as making an API call. So, so excited about this launch. Huge congratulations to the Courier team!” - Eric Koslow, CEO, Lattice

What’s next: notifications that delight, not distract

Product notifications are one of the rare parts of software that affect nearly everyone on earth. If you use the internet for work, to buy flights, to network, or to do just about anything else, you receive notifications from that software.

At their worst, product notifications are annoying, distracting, and anxiety inducing. They can come through different channels from text to email to mobile notifications - or from all of them at the same time, acting as a constant disrupter in the user’s life. At their best, product notifications deliver a delightful experience and make sure that we’re aware of key events that might help catch a flight, meet a deadline at work, or connect with a loved one. In other words, they provide useful interruptions that improve the user’s life.

We will use this new capital to continue to invest in our core mission of making all product notifications delightful, starting now with mobile. What that means today is delivering an amazing toolset to the builders, product and engineering teams, who are in charge of developing product notification systems for their apps. We believe that just about everyone in these roles wants to deliver great notifications with excellent user experience, and that the better the tools and resources at their disposal are, the more able they will be to accomplish this.

Introducing Courier’s new mobile capabilities

Today, we’re announcing a new set of two tools and resources for product builders to deliver delightful notifications for their mobile applications. Mobile notifications are the most ubiquitous type of notifications and the one with most potential to annoy users. One annoying notification experience can result in a user turning off notifications altogether, which greatly reduces both the utility and engagement of any mobile application.

The first is our new mobile SDK. This SDK makes it easier for developers to manage push tokens across devices and operating systems. This gives developers better control and visibility, making it easy for them to deliver a more consistent and customized experience for their users based on the best way to reach and engage their users for their specific app. Here’s an example:

// Register multiple devices for a given user. Notifications will be delivered to each 
// device in a single send call.

{
  "tokens": [
    {
      "token": "abc123",
      "provider_key": "apn",
      "properties": {
        "test": true
      },
      "device": {
        "app_id": "com.my.app",
        "platform": "iOS",
        "model": "iPhone 13"
      }
    },
    {
      "token": "cba321",
      "provider_key": "firebase-fcm",
      "tracking": {
        "ip": "127.0.0.1",
        "lat": "0.0",
        "long": "123"
      }
    }
  ]
}

The second is our new mobile notification inbox. This inbox can be easily integrated with any mobile application, and gives the user a central place to view notifications, even if they have disabled push notifications. This gives the end user the ability to better customize their experience using an app by deciding when to access notifications, thereby reducing the number of interruptions mobile notifications cause in their daily lives while increasing engagement with the notifications developers deem necessary to use the product properly.

Visit this page to learn more about this new mobile functionality and request a demo and checkout this video of me demoing them below.

Conclusion: The work is just beginning

Our mission to make notifications delightful is a big one and there’s still a ton of work to do. We could not have made it to where we are today without all of our fantastic customers, New Relic, LaunchDarkly, Lattice, Color Health, and many others who share our belief in the value of delivering a great product notification experience. This new funding presents a great opportunity to achieve this ultimate goal. Get a demo here to learn more about Courier’s goals for mobile notifications!

If you are interested in helping to build the future of notification technology starting with mobile channels, we are hiring!