Mobile app retargeting startup Remerge raises $3M

The company allows developers to re-engage their lapsed users inside other apps

Mobile advertising is big business. Gartner has forecasted global spending for mobile advertising industry will hit over $40 billion, and mobile app store revenues worldwide will hit over $75 billion, both by 2017. Spending on Mobile Display Ads is expected to reach $20 billion by 2016, with 70% of the spend on In-App purchases.

Yet developers still lack the necessary tools to retarget their message into other apps, which would allow them to get back their previous users who had stopping using their app.

Enter Remerge, a service that allows app developers to re-engage their lapsed users inside other apps and in every country around the world in order to increase retention and boost user lifetime value by driving active users, purchases, orders, bookings, subscriptions and revenues.

For example, app developers can segment all users who have installed their app and already made a purchase, but haven’t opened the app in 14 days. Remerge targets these users, while they are inside another app, via a highly personalised display ad in order to re-engage them.

Remerge processes 1,300 billion bid requests and 1.2 billion user events per month for global advertisers such as Spotify, Funstage and Foodpanda.

The Berlin-based company, which was founded in 2014, announced that it has just raised a $3 million Series A round led by Point Nine Capital, along with Valor, VC Fonds Technologie Berlin, German Startups Group, West Tech Ventures and Rheingau Ventures. 

The company had previously raised a $1 million seed round in June of last year, bringing its total funding to $4 million.

The company also announced the opening of its new office San Francisco, in order to fuel its expansion into the United States.

I spoke to Pan Katsukis, CEO of Remerge, about his company, its mission and what he sees as the future of mobile advertising. 

VatorNews: What is the problem that Remerge is trying to solve? How does it solve it?

Pan Kaysukis: During our time at madvertise and LiquidM we realized that app developers were missing the tools to analyze and segment their existing app user base and deliver personalized marketing messages in thousands of other apps. Remerge offers a platform and streamlines the app retargeting process.

App developers don't need to integrate anything in addition to their existing attribution provider or analytics service to get transparency on their user base. They can segment users in any combination (i.e. inactives, purchasers, level-5-finishers) and retarget them in other apps via realtime advertising. Remerge currently has an average of 260,000 user touch-points per second in 330,000 apps.

VN: Who is the typical customer for Remerge ? How many customers do you have?

PK: The typical Remerge customer is an app developer, who wants to increase engagement, sales or revenues with their existing user base. We are already working with 20% of the Top 100 global grossing Apps.

VN: Why is what Remerge does valuable to its customers? What is the ROI?

PK: 69% of users open a new app 10 times or less. Remerge offers an easy tool to bring back the user into the app and drive engagement. For our current customers we deliver an average of 9% additional sales, booking, subscriptions or revenues for our customers.

VN: Can you give me some use cases? How and why does the typical customer use Remerge?

PK: App developers are beginning to understand that the app download is not enough! The majority of app users quickly become dormant and it is up to 95% cheaper to re-engage a dormant user through retargeting than to acquire a new one. Remerge offers app developers a way to re-engage dormant users, and encourage spend, via personalized creatives inside other apps.

A typical example segment is everybody, who has already done a purchase, but is inactive since 14 days. Once set up, Remerge shows a display banner with a personalized message in the different apps the user uses (i.e. their Weather App) with the goal to bring them back to our customer's app with the ultimate goal to make him to a buying customer again.

Remerge achieves this through these three ways:

• Smartly segmenting users. These segments are determined on very specific parameters that become more granular and precise as Remerge gathers behavioural data.

• Displaying the creative at the right time and in the right place, with a banner message that is adapted to different users (e.g. the message for someone who is reusing the app would be different from the message for people who just downloaded the app). The banners are created by working together with clients. Soon, native creative advertisements will be introduced to provide more flexibility.

• Knowing where to send users once they’ve clicked: For example, a user that had just installed Spotify could be sent to a content page, a user that visited the premium site would be sent to the discount page for its  premium service.

VN: How many employees do you currently have? How many workers are you planning to hire in San Francisco?

PK: Remerge currently employs 19 people and have recently opened an office in San Francisco. The US sales and account managers are based there, while the development, European sales and operations teams remain based in Berlin.

We plan to hire 5 additional people in the next 6 months in San Francisco.

VN: What separates Remerge from other similar companies? What do you do that they can’t or won’t?

PK: First of all we are the first platform to be build from ground up to solve app retargeting. We were the first to introduce the easy setup of app retargeting without the use of static user lists or the need to integrate an SDK. We are integrated with most app attribution and analytics provider in the market and app developers can use start working with us via their dashboard.

We can provide huge scale, with currently 260,000 user touchpoints per second on average in 330,000 apps. Our technology combines data access, dynamic user segmentation and programmatic buying in one streamlined technology to deliver better performance for our customers.

We offer a self-service dashboard with insights on audience and campaign data providing transparency on user behavior, for example in what other apps they perform best.

In the end Remerge can deliver on average 9% additional sales, booking, subscriptions or revenues for our customers. 

VN: What is the philosophy behind Remerge? How would you like to disrupt the space in the next five or ten years?

PK: Remerge was launched by five founders who previously co-founded and worked at prominent German adtech companies madvertise and LiquidM. They became good friends during this time and wanted to use their learnings to bring value to tackle app retargeting, an industry that they found still lacked a solid, efficient and scalable platform.

Three of the founders, Martin Karlsch, Benedikt Böhm und Dr. Christian Wolter, are developers with a deep mobile adtech background. Remerge is the third Mobile DSP they have built. Benjamin Beivers, our CRO, and I complete the founding team. 

Before founding Remerge, I was involved in the early Berlin startup scene in 2008. I built the mobile advertising’s biggest programmatic buying platform, as a Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at madvertise. The company grew to the biggest independent mobile ad network in its home market Germany, rolled out the business in several other markets and grew the team to over 100 people.

Remerge’s overall mission is to provide the best experience for app retargeting. It achieves this by accessing all the touchpoints that could potentially be available to a user and providing them with the most appropriate personalized message at the right time and place. 

In order to achieve that Remerge focuses on three pillars to solve for its customers: Scale, Performance and Transparency. All efforts will be put to increase the results in these dimensions, i.e. by adding additional creative formats like native ads and video ads to offer a more personalized experience and to increase the number of touch points.