South African Mobiz Secures $4m from South African VCs

South African e-Commerce startup integrating hyper-personalization into mobile marketing, Mobiz, has secured $4m from HAVAÍC, Futuregrowth, Launch Africa, Allan Gray E-Squared Ventures, CapaciTech, and Endeavor’s Harvest Fund.

The funding aims to propel the startup’s growth into the United States and increase its marketing, sales, and account management activities.

The startup has also noted that a portion of the fund will be used to hire new employees in South Africa and to support the company’s commercial expansion into the United States.

Mobiz is a no-code solution launched in 2014 by CEO Greg Chen. The startup allows marketers, businesses, and small businesses to build and send SMS campaigns to their clients without having any prior marketing knowledge.

Mobiz sees potential in the small and medium business sector in the United States, according to Chen, because “its solution is easy to use and fit for the enormous market opportunity in the United States,” as the startup plans to launch this month5 with more than 200 beta users in the United States presently using the platform

CEO, Greg Chen speaking said that having disrupted its space in South Africa, the startup plans on furthering its service delivery to SMBs.

“How we’ve disrupted our space in South Africa, we see an opportunity over there. So we want to help many SMBs easily produce beautiful customer engagements that are personalized at scale to make them clickable within 10 minutes on their platforms. That’s our thesis and we are very hopeful that we will work out.

“In South Africa and Africa general, there are a lot of companies using SMS marketing, but it’s not giving any value to them because they lack digital marketing skills. So we came to enable businesses to deliver personalized digital content via a personal landing page that can be built easily within the Mobiz platform and deliver on the SMS channel,” said Greg.

Futuregrowth makes investments from its Futuregrowth Development Equity Fund, a venture capital fund devoted to supporting disruptive businesses and propositions that show strong high growth potential. The VC has previously invested in SA home services startup SweepSouth.