Braze, Inc. (Braze) operates as a customer engagement platform that empowers brands to Be Absolutely Engaging.
Customer Engagement is an emerging category of business activity and software, which the company defines as the full set of activities that companies use to build and maintain direct, meaningful relationships with their customers. The company’s platform empowers brands to listen to their customers better, understand them more deeply, and act on that understanding in a way that is human...
Braze, Inc. (Braze) operates as a customer engagement platform that empowers brands to Be Absolutely Engaging.
Customer Engagement is an emerging category of business activity and software, which the company defines as the full set of activities that companies use to build and maintain direct, meaningful relationships with their customers. The company’s platform empowers brands to listen to their customers better, understand them more deeply, and act on that understanding in a way that is human and personal. As of January 2025, 2,296 customers around the world trusted Braze to power their cross-channel customer engagement strategies. In January 2025, the company’s platform enabled interactions with 7.2 billion monthly active users via its customers’ apps, websites, and other digital interfaces.
The company has welcomed more and more digital services and products into its lives and integrated them into nearly every activity that people take part in. It views its own role as steward of a brand's first-party relationships, achieved through the sophisticated management of their first-party data, as well as the orchestration and delivery of critical components of their marketing and product experience across an increasingly non-linear and digital customer journey.
The company built Braze to facilitate the craft of customer engagement—a pursuit that is distinct from merely the activity of sending marketing messages. The craft of customer engagement brings together diverse skillsets, bold creativity, the sophisticated use of data, and an agile, experimental approach to the strategy that unlocks value in more of the moments that matter for customers as they move through their journey with a brand.
In addition to avoiding siloed channels and data, the company’s platform empowers real-time engagement between brands and their customers. The real-time nature of the interactions that it enables is crucial and is made possible by its proprietary, enterprise-grade stream processing architecture. This architecture receives, contextualizes, and responds to first-party customer data in the moment. The company has designed it to listen like a human would, process new information in context, and react instantaneously, enabling marketers to run engagement campaigns and messaging that feel relevant and personal.
Braze also unleashes the power of interdisciplinary teams by serving numerous stakeholders beyond traditional marketers, including product and engineering teams, business intelligence, and data engineering teams. The company’s platform produces valuable data that informs decisions and actions across customer engagement strategies. The company’s engagement capabilities transcend marketing use cases, often being used for product or transactional use cases that facilitate or enhance the consumer’s experience with the brand or product. As a result, Braze is often a critical part of its customers’ communications infrastructure.
The company’s platform is also designed to serve the needs of customers across sizes, stages of growth, industries, and geographies. The company’s customers include many established global enterprises and leading technology innovators. It employs a land-and-expand business model centered around offering products that are easy to adopt and have a rapid time to value. The company expands its reach within existing customers when they add new channels, purchase additional subscription products, implement new engagement strategies, or onboard new business units and geographies. The company also grows as its customers grow because its pricing is based in large part on the number of consumers that its customers reach and the volume of messages its customers send.
A key aspect of Braze's differentiation is that it offers a platform, not a point solution, that gives brands an end-to-end solution for achieving their customer engagement goals, not just a tool to send messages. The company vertically integrates its data activation, insights and segmentation, orchestration, personalization and relevance capabilities, and also leverages artificial intelligence (‘AI’) investments across each layer of the stack, so coordinating between them is simple and fast. Meanwhile, it abstracts away the particulars of disparate data sources and the vagaries of the many messaging channels that it supports, so that when marketers implement their customer engagement strategies in Braze, they can maintain a customer-centric mindset—focused on the intersection of the goals of their brand with the needs of the consumer, not the complexity of data integrations or siloed message channels. This also provides consistency across Braze's insights and segmentation, orchestration, and relevance feature set, making it easier for the company’s customers to expand across channels, and allowing its research and development investments into areas like predictive intelligence or Braze's Canvas visual development environment to deliver broad impact quickly and efficiently.
This product architecture supports differentiated use of AI and machine learning through its comprehensive access to first-party data, and an ability to directly take action to guide the customer journey. When deployed by its customers, its platform is typically leveraged across consumer touchpoints and sources of first-party data, including integration of the Braze software development kits, or SDKs, into end-user applications and websites, and the configuration of automated connections into customer data warehouses or data platforms via the Braze Data Platform. This enables more advanced experimentation and automated decision-making, and also creates the opportunity to personalize and optimize customer journeys at scale. With BrazeAI, marketers can improve outcomes for both consumers and brands by creating experiences with relevant content, journeys, and offers tailored to each individual. The company’s platform also has the promise to improve operational efficiency for the teams that use Braze— as it continues to expand its product surface area and enhance its capabilities by infusing AI, it can help brands create personalized, cross-channel solutions faster, and compound their learnings through automated experimentation and data analysis, ultimately increasing their return on investment over time.
Within the orchestration layer, the company enables marketers to easily design, visualize, and launch customer journeys utilizing Canvas, the company’s proprietary, no-code journey orchestration tool. With Canvas’s comprehensive journey testing, marketers can also test, implement, and optimize the most effective channels, cadence, messaging, or creative elements from a single tool. As the usability of Canvas has improved over time, more customer communication and engagement workloads have adopted it, which cements Braze in its customers’ technology ecosystems. The company has also developed, and continues to refine, an AI recommendation engine that utilizes a custom-trained transformer model to match items for Braze Catalogs with customers more likely to buy them, providing content personalization that can outperform competing techniques.
The company supports interactions across both in-product and out-of-product messaging channels. Today, the company’s messaging channels consist of widely used digital channels, such as email; mobile messaging, such as SMS, MMS, and RCS messages, WhatsApp, and LINE messaging, and webhooks; as well as in-product and web experiences, such as in-app messages (including in-product messaging to apps on connected TV and gaming platforms), in-browser messages, surveys, mobile and web push notifications, Braze Content Cards—which are flexible, content-rich messages embedded in a mobile app or web browsers, Landing Pages—which are standalone web pages with a single call-to-action often used for audience acquisition and conversion, and Feature Flags—which allow the company’s customers to remotely enable or disable mobile or web experiences for different audiences. Finally, Braze Audience Sync also unifies owned and paid channel strategies across platforms, such as Meta, Google, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, and Criteo. The flexibility of the company’s platform also allows it to add new channels quickly and efficiently as they become relevant to its customers.
The company enables brands to easily integrate its platform with both in-house technical infrastructure and its expanding partner ecosystem of best-in-class technologies. For instance, capabilities within the Braze Data Platform allow its customers to set up a direct connection between their data warehouses or platforms and Braze to automatically sync relevant user attributes, events, and purchases. Once synced to Braze, this data can be imported into any layer of its platform and can be leveraged for use cases, such as personalization or segmentation. Customers can also use the Braze Data Platform to stream data in real-time to those systems, which increases the return on the company’s customers’ other technology investments. The company supports direct integrations with a range of providers, including cloud data service and warehouses, customer data platforms, analytics and reporting solutions, as well as other components of the modern marketing technology ecosystem, such as eCommerce and Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS, applications.
The company is dependent on Apple services and Google services for delivery of mobile and web notifications. It relies on cloud computing infrastructure, particularly from Amazon Web Services, or AWS, to host the company’s platform and support its operations and many of the internal products it uses to operate its business. The company also hosts its end-user profiles on Rackspace.
Growth Strategy
The principal components of the company’s growth strategy are to acquire new customers; expand within the company’s existing customer base; expand geographically; expand the company’s technology leadership through continued investment and new products; and continue to increase and strengthen the company’s partnerships.
Products
The company offers a single, vertically integrated platform that encompasses the major functionalities, or layers, required for modern customer engagement: data activation, insights and segmentation, orchestration, relevance, and cross-channel action, all of which is supported by BrazeAI, the company’s AI engine designed to power AI functionality across all layers of this technology stack.
BrazeAI
Braze delivers a range of BrazeAI features across all layers of its vertically-integrated technology stack to enable brands to create, personalize, and optimize their customer engagement efforts. Specific features that leverage BrazeAI are noted below within the applicable layer of the technology stack.
Data Activation
The Braze Data Platform is a comprehensive, composable set of Braze capabilities and partner integrations designed to help marketers leverage data to deliver more impactful, scalable customer experiences powered by Braze. This includes features, such as:
Braze SDKs: The primary way in which customers integrate the company’s platform into their websites and applications is via its SDKs. SDKs are software libraries that reside within its customers’ applications or websites, automatically managing data ingestion and the delivery of mobile and web notifications, in-application/in-browser interstitial messages, and Braze Content Cards. The company’s SDKs can be integrated into a wide variety of digital interfaces including iOS, Android, Desktop/Mobile Web, connected TVs, the Unity and Unreal game engines, and application development frameworks, such as React Native and Cordova. By embedding new messaging capabilities directly in the company’s SDKs, it can rapidly deploy new functionality to its customers, with little to no additional effort on their part.
REST API: The majority of the company’s customers also integrate via connecting to server-to-server APIs. The Braze REST API can be used to import or export data or to trigger workflows between Braze and brands’ existing technology stacks. For example, customers can send messages using Braze within internal business processes or connect Braze to third-party services, such as customer data platforms or attribution providers.
Partner Data Integrations: Brands can sync user cohorts from partners, such as Amplitude, Tealium, or Mixpanel to its platform. They can then use membership in these user cohorts as additional criteria in the Braze Classification layer. Retail brands can also sync e-commerce data directly from Shopify, configurable via a simple web interface.
Data Transformation: Brands can programmatically sync and transform user data from SaaS tools or platforms that can send webhooks. Once synced to the company’s platform, this data can be used just like any other data in the Braze platform.
Braze Cloud Data Ingestion: Braze Cloud Data Ingestion is a key example of composability within the Braze Data Platform. By offering direct connections to all major cloud services and data warehouses, Marketing, Product, and Growth teams can access their customer and product data directly from the source—for audience construction, segmentation, message triggering, and personalization. Cloud Data Ingestion removes the need to maintain complex data pipelines and empowers brands with direct data access, without ongoing reliance on technical teams.
Insights and Segmentation
Segmentation: Customers can define reusable segments of consumers based upon data, such as, but not limited to, attributes, events, user behaviors, product catalog metadata, or predictive propensity scores from the company’s machine learning algorithms. Braze Segments are updated in real-time as data is ingested, allowing them to stay up-to-date with the latest data inputs.
Segment Insights: Segment Insights allows customers to analyze how segments are performing relative to each other across a set of pre-selected key performance indicators. Additionally, customers can use this tool to understand the factors that determine which consumers belong to a particular segment.
BrazeAI Predictive Suite: The BrazeAI Predictive Suite allows customers to identify groups of consumers that are of critical business value, such as ‘consumers who are likely to churn.’ The company’s platform uses machine learning to automatically identify consumers who have a propensity to behave similarly to the identified audience, allowing customers to preemptively engage these consumers and thereby encourage or discourage their predicted behaviors.
Orchestration
Canvas: Canvas is the company’s flagship orchestration tool, allowing customers to create journeys, mapping out multi-step, cross-channel messaging experiences, such as onboarding flows, nurture campaigns, win-back strategies, and more. Canvases are designed to be flexible and real-time, able to execute nearly any digital marketing campaign strategy that customers can envision. Canvas is natively cross-channel, and customers use it to design and execute strategies that span all of the platforms and channels that its platform supports. Using Canvas, customers can create multiple variants of a journey and automatically optimize customer journeys based on the performance of the variants.
Campaigns: Campaigns allow customers to send one set of single-channel or multi-channel messages to be delivered to customers in a particular user segment. Campaigns can be one-time or recurring sends that are delivered on a time-based schedule, or can be sent in response to a user’s actions, or triggered by an API call. Campaigns support all of Braze’s messaging channels and offer experimentation, such as A/B testing.
Event and API Triggering: Messages, steps within a Canvas, or entire Canvas flows can be triggered in a variety of ways, such as when events of a certain type are received or when API calls are initiated from the company’s customers’ servers.
Marketing Pressure Management: Customers can create sophisticated and targeted campaigns designed to appropriately target the individual consumer. Customers can use the company’s platform to automatically run a multi-armed bandit optimization, and to send each user the campaign variant they are most likely to engage based on A/B testing. Once the appropriate campaign has been identified, the company’s customers can then limit the number of messages sent from the platform by capping the frequency of message type (e.g., no more than three push notifications per week or no more than one promotional email per day), or by limiting the speed at which the platform sends messages (e.g., no more than 10,000 messages per minute).
Reporting and Analytics: The company provides a variety of analytics features to help its customers understand and improve their customer engagement strategies:
Campaign and Canvas Analytics: The company’s platform provides analytics breakdowns for all Campaigns and Canvases, including tracking conversion rates. Customers can create multiple variants, and results can be compared statistically against one another or a control.
Funnel and Retention Reports: Customers can analyze the retention uplift caused by a messaging strategy, or create and analyze funnels of actions that were taken by consumers after receiving a message.
BrazeAI Predictive Suite: The Braze Predictive Suite enables brands to use machine learning to determine what customers are likely to purchase and/or churn without any engineering resources. Predictive Churn and Predictive Purchases are customizable, on-demand predictive models brands can create in minutes to effectively leverage and act on data seamlessly within the Braze platform.
Report Builder: Customers can create custom reports to analyze the total uplift and aggregate statistics from their usage of its platform.
Dashboards: Braze enables customers to aggregate and further analyze engagement, conversion, deliverability, and other key performance metrics using pre-built, customizable dashboards.
Query Builder and BrazeAI Query Builder: Customers can generate highly-customized reports using a SQL editor or pre-built template. The BrazeAI Query Builder makes it easy for marketers to generate SQL from natural language prompting and receive sample SQL query suggestions.
Global Holdout Groups: To allow customers to isolate the impact of their marketing efforts, customers can create global holdout groups, consisting of consumers who should only receive a subset of critical communications from the customer (e.g., password reset emails) and otherwise be held out from all communication. Lifetime value of this holdout group can be easily compared against that of consumers who received the full suite of Braze engagement.
Relevance
Liquid Templating and BrazeAI Liquid Assistant: Customers can personalize messages using the Liquid Templating language to inject personalized content into their messages. The company’s platform allows customers to flexibly utilize a wide variety of data in this templating process, including data ingested and stored on consumer profiles, from Catalogs, as well as contextual data, such as properties of a consumer action that triggered a message flow. Personalization options include use cases, such as listing a set of consumer-specific recommendations or creating sophisticated if/else logic inside of a message to conditionally determine what content to deliver. The BrazeAI Liquid Assistant makes it easy for marketers to generate Liquid from templates, receive personalized Liquid suggestions, and optimize existing Liquid using natural language prompting. The assistant also provides annotations explaining the Liquid used, so marketers can further develop their skills and understanding of Liquid.
Connected Content: Customers can connect to remote servers (including both third-party partners and first-party customer-owned endpoints) and pull back data for advanced personalization use cases. For example, customers can personalize messages on a one-to-one basis by connecting to a recommendation engine or modify messages to a user based upon the current weather at the user’s location.
Content Management: Customers can upload, store, and reuse various types of content across messages. Braze offers both pre-built and customer-generated templates, a media asset library, a preference center builder, and Content Blocks. Content Blocks enable customers to create reusable, cross-channel content (including Liquid Templating content). Templates, Content Blocks, and a customer’s preference center can also be updated and managed via API, extending their functionality and connecting them to customer data sources dynamically. Customers can also utilize its generative AI functions to support the development of new content or images, and use its approval workflows to provide additional oversight of how and when content is used in campaigns.
BrazeAI Content Generation and Quality Assurance:
AI Copywriting Assistant: The BrazeAI copywriting assistant enables customers to generate relevant copy that references their brand personality and guidelines. Customers can generate marketing copy directly in message composers in the Braze dashboard, offering inspiration for new approaches to copy or helping to scale personalized, on-brand copy across customer experiences.
AI Image Generator: Customers can generate images for their media library using BrazeAI. This system can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language.
AI Content QA: Content QA using BrazeAI performs checks on the content of a message, confirming that it adheres to quality standards by identifying ineffective elements, such as spelling errors, grammar issues, inappropriate tone, and offensive language.
Intelligent Timing and Channel: The company’s platform will automatically calculate when consumers are most likely to engage with a particular messaging channel, and can send messages to consumers at the time that is optimal for them based upon their behavior patterns for a particular channel.
Personalized Variant: The company’s platform can send each user the campaign variant they are most likely to engage with, based on an analysis of how users with similar profiles responded to each variant in an initial A/B test.
BrazeAI Item Recommendations: Customers can calculate what is likely to be the most popular item or product, or create personalized AI recommendations from a specific catalog, which can then be inserted into messages.
Catalogs: Customers can store relational or tabular data with Braze that can be used for segmentation, event triggering, and message personalization. Data stored in Braze Catalogs can be synced automatically from customer data warehouses using Braze Cloud Data Ingestion, and Catalogs natively support triggered notifications, such as ‘back-in-stock’ journeys that can trigger when an item in a Catalog is replenished and back in stock. For example, Catalog data can be combined with the company’s Braze segmentation to identify high-value cohorts of customers, such as users who recently viewed products that are now discounted. Catalogs can also be used for basic product recommendation use cases.
Cross-Channel Action
In-Product Messaging and Experimentation:
In-App and In-Browser Messages: The company’s platform offers a variety of interstitial messages that can be added to mobile applications and web browsers for engagement use cases—ranging from reminders, confirmation dialogs, promotions, surveys, and more. These in-experience messages can be built from templates using the company’s drag-and-drop editor, or built from scratch with nearly infinite customizability.
Braze Content Cards: In addition to ephemeral messages, the company offers Braze Content Cards, a proprietary product where a personalized feed of user-controllable content is embedded directly into applications and browsers for persistent viewing.
Feature Flags: Feature flags allow customers to remotely enable or disable mobile app or web functionality for a selection of users. Customers can turn a feature on and off in production without additional code deployment or app store updates. This allows customers to safely roll out new features with confidence and coordinate rollouts with messaging across the full set of channels supported by its platform.
Landing Pages: Landing Pages are standalone webpages that customers can use to drive user acquisition and engagement. Customers can use the company’s native Landing Page builder to create and launch custom landing pages in a drag-and-drop editor. This allows customers to capture new leads, or, if used throughout the customer lifecycle, to drive conversions on upsells, loyalty programs, content downloads, referrals, and more.
Out-of-Product Messaging:
Push Notifications: The company’s platform provides robust push notification messaging capabilities across both mobile and web. In addition to supporting push notifications on all major platforms, it has released advanced functionality, such as Push Stories (paginated image carousels within notifications) and iOS Live Activities (persistent, interactive notifications displayed directly on users’ lock screens), to increase the power and flexibility of the channel.
Email: The company’s platform provides a full suite of email engagement technology, including email template editing and management with a drag-and-drop editor, link tracking, and heatmap analytics, email preference centers, and seed lists. The company also supports advanced email content types, such as Accelerated Mobile Pages, which enables marketers to embed interactive elements.
SMS, MMS, and RCS: The company’s platform offers a native product for SMS, MMS, and RCS messaging. In addition to sending messages via the SMS, MMS, and RCS protocols, customers can manage links and analytics, and respond to inbound keyword responses with an automated follow-up message.
Ad Network Integrations: Using Braze Audience Sync with Meta, Google, TikTok, Snapchat, Pinterest, or Criteo, brands can sync first-party data from Braze to each respective advertising platform to deliver more relevant advertisements outside the Braze platform based upon behavioral triggers, segmentation, and more.
WhatsApp Integration: The company’s platform is directly integrated with the WhatsApp Cloud API, making it easy to natively compose and orchestrate two-way messages as part of cross-channel campaigns in Braze.
LINE Integration: The company’s platform is also integrated with LINE. Brands can leverage zero- and first-party data to compose and orchestrate relevant LINE messages as a part of any cross-channel campaign in Braze.
Webhooks: The company’s platform offers flexible webhooks, allowing customers to connect Braze to any external application via outbound web requests, using all of the targeting and templating mechanisms available on other channels. Customers can use webhooks for utility purposes, such as messaging to their own servers, as well as to build integrations with other third-party partner systems, such as to direct email providers, extending the range and utility of the company’s platform.
Transactional Messaging: The company offers an optional premium service with even higher speed and reliability guarantees for critical use cases.
Braze Currents: All data sent to and generated by the company’s platform can be continuously exported to a range of partner systems. These systems include data storage partners, such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud; Customer Data Platforms, such as Segment, mParticle, and Tealium; and analytics providers, such as Amplitude and Mixpanel. Braze Currents can also export data to generic web endpoints for maximum flexibility. Customers can use these integrations to leverage their Braze data elsewhere within their technology ecosystem, thereby enabling tighter collaboration between marketing/growth teams and their partners in business intelligence or engineering.
Snowflake Data Sharing: Alongside Braze Currents, data tracked and stored within the company’s platform can also be accessed directly via its partnership with Snowflake using Snowflake’s Data Sharing mechanism.
In addition, the company provides several features for general management of its platform designed to allow customers of all sizes to maximize their efficiency:
Operations and Administration: The company provides audit logs for major actions that occur in its platform, change logs for updates to objects, such as Campaigns, Segments, or Canvases on its dashboard, and permissions, commenting, versioning, and approval flow capabilities in various parts of the product. Furthermore, the company offers, and plans to expand on, debugging capabilities in the platform that allow customers to better troubleshoot their integrations and messaging strategies.
Access Controls and Security: The company provides a complete set of Role-Based Access Controls to allow large global teams to manage its platform effectively. In addition to these Role-Based Access Control mechanisms, the company offers Braze Teams, which allows customers to break their consumer base into segments based on the consumer’s country, language, or a custom attribute. With Braze Teams, customers can create groups to manage individual regions or subsets of their businesses while restricting the ability of specified users to view or manage data outside of their assigned region. The company also integrates with a variety of identity providers for single sign-on or user account provisioning, and provides configurable security controls, such as session timeouts, password complexity, two-factor authentication, and IP allow lists.
Competition
The company faces competition from software companies that offer marketing solutions, such as legacy marketing clouds like Adobe and Salesforce, and point solutions like Airship, Iterable, Klaviyo, CleverTap, and MoEngage.
Sales and Marketing
The company sells subscriptions to its platform primarily through a direct sales force with primary operations in North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region. The company’s team of account executives is responsible for selling to new customers, as well as existing customers who may renew their subscriptions, increase the usage of its platform over time, and expand the deployment of its platform across their organizations. In addition, the company sells its platform through its joint venture in Japan, as well as through resellers in South Korea and Latin America.
The company’s marketing activities are designed to build broad brand awareness, generate thought leadership, and create demand and leads for the company’s sales organizations within its target markets. The company’s marketing programs target influencers and decision-makers participating in the buying cycle, including the Chief Digital Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Product Officer, Chief Technology Officer, and other key functional marketing and technology heads. Additionally, the company conducts marketing programs to engage with its customers to promote upsell and cross-sell opportunities, and engages with industry analysts, consulting firms, marketing service providers, data and technology partners, marketing agencies, and other platform partners, business and trade press, and other industry experts who exert considerable influence in its market.
Intellectual Property
As of January 31, 2025, the company owned 26 patents and had four patent applications pending for examination in the United States, and no non-U.S. patents or patent applications. The pending U.S. patent applications, if issued, would be scheduled to expire at various times between 2043 and 2044. As of January 31, 2025, the company owned six registered trademarks in the United States and 48 registered trademarks in various non-U.S. jurisdictions.
Trademarks
‘Braze,’ ‘Braze Alloys,’ ‘Braze Audience Sync,’ ‘Braze Bonfire,’ ‘Braze Cares,’ ‘Braze Catalogs,’ ‘Braze Classification,’ ‘Braze Cloud Data Ingestion,’ ‘Braze Currents,’ ‘Braze Predictive Suite,’ ‘Braze Segments,’ ‘Braze Teams,’ ‘Be Absolutely Engaging,’ ‘Canvas,’ ‘Braze Content Cards,’ ‘BrazeAI,’ and other trade names and trademarks of the company appearing are its property.
Seasonality
The company has experienced seasonality in its cost of revenue as a result of its customers’ increased usage of its platform based on their business demands. The company typically experiences the highest sequential increase in overall messaging volume and compute and storage requirements during the fourth quarter due to the increased activity related to the holiday season and general customer engagement efforts around the end of the calendar year (year ended January 31, 2025).
History
The company was founded in 2011. It was incorporated in the state of Delaware in 2011. The company was formerly known as Appboy, Inc. and changed its name to Braze, Inc. in 2017.
