Heather Arranie 
The Branch story is a fascinating one of a startup that achieved meteoric success in a short amount of time. It all started in 2014 when the team of founders decided to launch an online finance platform that helps people save and invest.
In less than four years, Branch has gone from a small startup to a company on the verge of breaking $100 million in revenue.
In this article, we’ll explore how Branch got to where it is today.
Branch On Track to Break $100 Million Revenue 4 Years After Launch
Branch is a mobile application platform offering an analytics and attribution solution for sophisticated marketers and product managers to understand customer journeys and optimise user acquisition campaigns across different interactions and platforms. Founded in January 2014 by CEO Alex Austin, Branch quickly gained traction in the market and has grown into one of the largest mobile app analytics companies with over 2,500 customers.
Branch provides insights-driven solutions to top apps worldwide, allowing companies to track user conversions, measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, automate customer segmentations, and personalise user experiences. They have built a network of services and partners to support an industry-leading mobile ecosystem. In addition to their core technologies like deep-linking, Branch also provides advanced messaging solutions such as branch notifications and branch surfaces engagement tools.
Branch’s success has been evident over the past few years: They have achieved significant milestones in terms of revenue growth with over $100M generated since launch in 2014. In 2019 alone, Branch signed hundreds of customers ranging from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies across different industries including gaming, finance technology (fintech), retail, lifestyle commerce (LCO) media entertainment (ME), travel & hospitality (T&H), ecommerce fashion & beauty (FB), luxury goods & services (LGS). With over 6 billion monthly active users and two billion unique monthly active devices installed globally that they can depend on for data insights, Branch is a no-brainer addition for any company looking for innovative ways to evaluate user behaviour across different channels.
Overview of the Branch Story
Branch On Track to Break $100 Million Revenue 4 Years After Launch is an incredible success story about the founding of a tech start-up and its journey towards achieving a milestone of reaching $100 million in revenue within four years. Founded by Alex Austin and Mada Seghete in 2014, Branch created technology that enabled mobile app developers to better understand who their customers were—positioning them to improve user engagement and boost app downloads.
Since then, Branch has grown from a two-person team to a robust platform with more than 500 employees and over 10,000 customers worldwide—including Facebook, Amazon, Slack, Uber Eats, Pandora, The Wall Street Journal, Yelp and many more. The team at Branch is incredibly passionate about helping mobile apps succeed throughout the customer lifecycle—across acquisitions, engagements and monetization.
Throughout the company’s growth journey there have been several defining moments—algorithmic advances in user understanding, partnering with some of the world’s largest companies as clients/partners and raising $175 million in venture capital. All these factors lead to today when they are on track to exceed $100 million in bookings this year alone. This success story is inspirational for tech entrepreneurs starting the journey and existing businesses looking to expand their reach.
Early Days
Four years ago, Branch co-founders Ameesh and Mada embarked on their entrepreneurial journey with a single goal — to bring together local and global businesses on a single platform. Little did they know, their small startup would soon be on track to break $100 million in revenue.
Let’s explore their story and how they have reached this milestone.
Founding the Company
Founder and CEO Alex Austin founded the branch in January of 2014. The company started as a side project that sought to help developers build better products and measure their work performance. Within a few years, it had grown into a powerful platform that provided insights into customer behaviour, allowing companies to improve their products and optimise customer experience.
Alex assembled an initial team of eight engineers to bring his vision to life. The small but talented crew worked in near-silence during their first year on the job, spending every available hour building out the platform and developing features. All this effort was met with success, as the product quickly gained traction in the industry despite its limited resources.
By October 2015, Branch had broken $1 million in ARR (annual recurring revenue), becoming one of the fastest growing companies in Silicon Valley. Branch went on to achieve many more milestones and wrote a few new records for SaaS companies: it reached $50 million ARR just 16 months after starting operations, leading many investors to invest heavily in the company’s long-term potential.
By 2019, Branch has grown exponentially, boasting over $100 million in annual recurring revenue; this is four times higher compared to when they opened a shop 5 years ago! With its high customer retention rates and booming demand for its services from larger businesses, Branch looks certain to keep growing for years to come.
Initial Challenges
When the founders of Branch, Tri Tran and Jake Joraanstad, set out in 2014 to provide an easy-to-use platform for people to buy products and services, they knew they would face significant obstacles. Their initial customers were offline businesses like laundromats, dry cleaning services, nail salons and beauty parlours that weren’t yet in the digital age; they didn’t have websites or modern payment processing systems.
The first challenge was convincing these brick and mortar businesses to adopt online sales and payments. To do this, Branch provided extensive training sessions for customers about using their platform and presented them with new opportunities for marketing their products. After numerous visits and flyers distributed throughout local neighbourhoods, a few stores adopted the platform, allowing the company to earn revenue from day one.
The growing user base brought additional challenges such as increasing demand for product updates and customizations. It also meant that more customer support was needed, so Branch started hosting more weekly technical training sessions to help users use the product better. These sessions helped refine how users were using the product and gave feedback on what features or improvements Branch could make. This strategy resulted in steady growth over the next few years as more businesses started adopting their software solution.
Today Branch is one of the most successful startups in Silicon Valley with over 100 million paid subscribers backed by numerous venture capital firms convinced by its strong record of innovation-driven growth strategies that it is ultimately on track to break 100 million dollars in revenue four years after launch!
Growth and Expansion
Since its founding in 2014, Branch has risen to the top as a mobile and web linking leader. In 2020, the company is now on track to break $100 million in revenue four years after launch.
In this article, we’ll dive into Branch’s growth and expansion to see how they reached this impressive milestone.
Securing Investment
Securing investment to lay a solid foundation for growth is an important part of business success. To move into the high growth phase, companies must invest in and embrace scalable technologies, hire talented individuals who complete the total corporate spectrum, develop reliable processes, and continue optimising their product offerings. Regarding Branch, this was the path we chose to reach our goals. We successfully closed three rounds of investor funding totaling $90 million from investors like Cowboy Ventures, Index Ventures, Foundation Capital, Greylock Ventures, Allotz Investments, Flybridge Capital Partners.
Our Board of Directors carefully considered the path of scaling through investment as early as our Series A Round in November 2014 when we decided it was time to add resources that could serve Branch’s ambitious vision and strengthen our capabilities to unlock value. Through these investments we were able to build out a global team of world-class engineers who create innovative products utilising advanced machine learning techniques; outreach and sales teams who bring valuable partnerships; customer experience experts; operations personnel who establish efficient processes; and talent acquisition specialists dedicated to building strong teams comprised of talented professionals from all over the world.
Our journey achieved tremendous success, enabling us to become a top-tier mobile customer retention platform for business partners worldwide — including some of today’s most recognized brands such as Walmart, Target, Starbucks and Best Buy. But this wasn’t just luck — every step required thoughtfulness, hard work, dedication and determination from everyone involved on our mission at Branch — ultimately bringing us on track to break $100 million revenue 4 years after launch.
Expanding the Team
When Branch started, it was a small team consisting largely of the original core founding members. However, as their success took off, they realised the need to expand their team to create an even more successful drive towards growth. Consequently, Branch has been able to steadily grow its staff as they have broken through $100 million in revenue.
Over the past four years, Branch has implemented strategies and programs that are helping them reach larger audiences and building a stronger community around their platform and servicing more partners worldwide. Scaling their teams allowed them to better structure the organisation while supporting international growth opportunities. This has allowed them to efficiently automate processes and help optimise customer experiences worldwide.
Branch was able to assess various sources and identify areas where customers have struggled when trying to get signed up for services with other companies in their industry or where there were gaps in experience delivery which hindered potential growth opportunities. This helped them recruit experts from various disciplines with prior industry knowledge that enabled optimised service delivery using AI/ML technology alongside traditional customer service operations and marketing teams who can focus solely on amplifying brand loyalty through content-led campaigns across digital channels.
Now that Branch is fully established as one of the most successful venture-backed startups, they’re actively growing departments such as data science and engineering who are dedicated solely towards mitigating risk associated with growing at breakneck speed while simultaneously achieving milestones ever more quickly – especially now, having just passed $100 million in revenue after just 4 years since launch!
Reaching $100 Million
Branch, a technology startup, has achieved incredible success by reaching the $100 million revenue milestone four years after its launch. This success story began when Branch’s founders identified a gap in the market and had the creativity and ingenuity to develop a solution that met the needs of its customers.
This article will explore the key factors that enabled Branch to reach this significant milestone and demonstrate its potential for future success.
Breaking Through the Barrier
Reaching $100 million in revenue is a major milestone for any company. But, unfortunately, few companies make it while maintaining their commitment to innovation and quality. But that’s precisely what Branch, a fast-growing mobile-first financial technology leader, achieved in just four years after launch. Despite being relatively small and agile, Branch managed to name itself among the most profitable companies, with over 13 million users across 178 countries.
When asked about the secret behind such rapid growth, the Founding Team quickly credited their passionate employees and product improvements based on customer feedback. “We’re all focused on creating a user experience that surpasses every competitor’s offering,” said CEO Alex Risenberg when asked what made Branch different from its competitors.
To break through the barrier of reaching $100 million revenue in such a short amount of time, the organisation enabled customers to save for large life events such as weddings or home renovations with an ability to access funds instantly when needed – a feature absent from its closest competitors at that time. And since launching in 2016, Branch has continued delivering cutting-edge features by introducing new products and staying focused on continual improvement through customer feedback.
Now at $125 million in annual revenue, Branch is looking further into international expansion plans to bridge the financial gap encountered by billions of individuals without access to traditional banking infrastructure across emerging markets worldwide. It remains well positioned for an even more impressive come back as businesses worldwide update financing operations due to pandemic economic recovery needs.
Setting New Goals
After surpassing the mark of $100 million revenue in 2018, Branch took stock of their success, gathered insights from their team members, and began to brainstorm new goals. Branch knew that achieving such tremendous growth over such a short span would not have been possible if it weren’t for their dedication to the mission and the hard work of their employees.
Branch determined that setting new objectives for teams across departments was essential to maintain their success and keep growing.
To create and share measurable target values across the organisation, Branch committed to taking four key steps:
- Defining goals and objectives strategically.
- Identifying stakeholders at every level.
- Connecting measurable outcomes with goals.
- Gathering team input to set realistic targets.
With these strategic activities in place, Branch can better measure its progress towards objectives over time. To continue growing into the future, Branch is committed to decision-making practices that are informed by data while at the same time treating each team member with respect and showing appreciation for their contributions. With this approach in place, Branch hopes to achieve new goals yet again!
