Braze, Inc. (NASDAQ: BRZE)

Braze, Inc., also known as BRZE, is a prominent player in the customer engagement platform industry. The company's mission is to foster human connections between consumers and the brands they adore through absolutely engaging experiences. Braze offers a platform that amalgamates diverse skillsets, bold creativity, sophisticated data usage, and an agile, experimental approach to strategy, thereby enhancing customer engagement.

The core business activities of Braze revolve around providing a comprehensive customer engagement platform. This platform empowers brands to better comprehend their customers, interact with them across various touchpoints, and deliver personalized experiences. The platform supports cross-channel customer engagement strategies, allowing brands to connect with their customers through in-app messages, in-browser messages, surveys, push notifications, email, SMS and MMS messages, WhatsApp messaging, webhooks, Content Cards, and Feature Flags.

Braze's platform is constructed around four main layers: data ingestion, classification, orchestration, and personalization. The data ingestion layer facilitates the collection and integration of customer data from multiple sources. The classification layer enables segmentation of customers based on attributes, events, and behaviors, which can be used to trigger messages and personalization. The orchestration layer allows brands to design, visualize, and launch customer journeys using Braze's proprietary Canvas tool. The personalization layer uses machine learning algorithms to predict customer behavior and deliver personalized messages and experiences.

Braze's competitive strengths include its cross-channel approach, data streaming architecture, scalability, and seamless integrations with various technologies and platforms. The company's customer base comprises established global enterprises and leading technology innovators, with a presence in over 70 countries and operational regions spanning North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region. Braze's growth strategy involves acquiring new customers, expanding within the existing customer base, expanding geographically, and investing in new products and technology leadership.

In terms of products, Braze offers a single, vertically integrated platform that includes data ingestion, classification, orchestration, personalization, and action. The company's SDKs enable brands to integrate the platform into their websites and applications, while its REST API allows for server-to-server integrations. Braze also offers partner data integrations, data transformation, and cloud data ingestion, enabling brands to sync and transform user data from various sources.

The Predictive Suite of Braze allows customers to identify groups of consumers of critical business value, such as consumers likely to churn. The platform uses machine learning to automatically identify consumers with a propensity to behave similarly to the identified audience, enabling customers to proactively engage these consumers and influence their predicted behaviors.

The Canvas tool allows customers to create journeys, mapping out multi-step, cross-channel messaging experiences such as onboarding flows, nurture campaigns, win-back strategies, and more. Campaigns enable customers to send one set of single-channel or multi-channel messages to be delivered to customers in a particular user segment. The platform also offers event and API triggering, marketing pressure management, reporting and analytics, and personalized variant.

Braze's platform is directly integrated with the WhatsApp Cloud API, making it easy to natively compose and orchestrate two-way messages as part of any cross-channel campaign in Braze. The company's platform also 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.

In the competitive landscape, Braze operates in a highly competitive market for customer engagement solutions. The company faces intense competition from software companies offering marketing solutions, such as legacy marketing clouds like Adobe and Salesforce, and point solutions like Airship, Iterable, Klaviyo, Clevertap (Leanplum) and MoEngage. Braze's sales and marketing efforts are geared towards building broad brand awareness, generating thought leadership, and creating demand and leads for its sales organizations within its target markets. The company's marketing programs target influencers and decision-makers participating in the buying cycle, including the Chief Customer Officer, Chief Digital Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Technology Officer, and other key functional marketing and technology heads.