How WebEngage grew from an on-site survey widget into a retention platform doubling revenue year over year
Two engineers in Mumbai turned a frustration with slow deployment cycles into a marketing automation suite used by thousands of enterprise brands, reporting 100% growth YoY since 2017.
Co-founder · X
Part of Indian SaaS builders
Business snapshot
- Business model
- SaaS
- Team
- 2 founders
- Based in
- Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
- Growth since 2017
- 100% YoY
- Active websites by Jun 2013
- 10,000
- 2020 retention rate
- 60%+
- Seasonal churn through COVID
- under 30%
- Engagement channels
- ten
- EngageCast episodes aired
- 29
Tools
- AWS
- Slack
- Zoom
- ClickUp
- Recruiterbox
- Infobip
- Kaleyra
- SparkPost
Founder-reported figures, not independently verified.
Who built it, and what they built
Avlesh Singh is CEO and co-founder of WebEngage, a Mumbai-based company he has run since 2011 alongside CTO and co-founder Ankit Ureja. The business positions itself as a retention operating system aimed at mid-segment enterprises that want to stop losing customers they already have.
The suite combines a customer data platform, a campaign orchestration layer with a drag-and-drop journey builder, and on-site and in-app personalization, all feeding campaigns across ten communication channels. Its customers span industries such as e-commerce, edtech, fintech, gaming and healthcare, and include large Indian consumer brands in finance, education, entertainment, travel and retail.
The founder says brands using the platform attribute nearly a third of their conversions to campaigns run through it, and that the model is built to lift repeat purchases and customer lifetime value.
Where the idea came from
The idea grew out of the founders' experience as engineers building consumer products. They kept seeing marketing teams unable to publish promotional messages on their own websites or measure results because every change had to wait on development and deployment cycles.
They concluded the bottleneck was a large, shared problem and set out to let marketers communicate on-site without writing code. The first version of the product, launched in 2011, offered contextual on-site feedback forms and short targeted surveys, and it expanded into mobile engagement over the following years.
Market research reinforced their conviction: they cite an industry forecast putting marketing automation spend at USD 3.3 billion in 2019 and USD 6.4 billion by 2024, and note that the martech landscape now counts more than 8000 vendors, which they read as proof of demand for tools that raise customer lifetime value.
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