Klaviyo’s Email Marketing Machine Hits $10B Valuation

What started as a small project for an early-stage company: we kept having to re-acquire clients from scratch at every campaign, with no way to reuse user data for marketing. Based on problems we ran into ourselves, I built an email mass-marketing tool as a side service. I handled the development while my co-founder focused on sales. Three years in, we hit 1 million yuan in annual revenue and then brought on employees to help scale. (In the beginning, we were actually building something like a CRM tool so we could collect and organize event attendee data ourselves, and we also helped other companies do the same—consolidating their own user information into a centralized database. Once clients had that data, they wanted to move beyond just viewing it; they wanted to proactively market to their users. I noticed the gap too, so I started filtering out email addresses from their datasets and built a proactive email-sending tool. With an existing client base, revenue took off quickly.)

We were running a small, boutique two-person company when our main revenue-generating client decided to terminate the partnership. Their reason: they were worried we were too small to keep up with their growth needs. That was the moment we decided to scale up—hire people, grow the business. Then we caught a wave when Mailchimp split from Shopify; we moved aggressively and became their next big partner, growing rapidly.

Pairing a CRM with reach tools is like giving a unified customer data platform an automated marketing engine on top. Clients experience how easy it is to manage their users, and they can clearly see the value generated by outreach—what happens is when a user takes action A, the system automatically triggers a corresponding marketing email for A. Once configured, the tool runs autonomously, marketing based on user behavior. That’s precisely what WeChat Work has been trying to do.

Red Ocean Growth Retrospective: How «Sending Emails» Built a $9.5B Valuation