Notification Infrastructure Provider Knock Announces $12 Million Series A Led by Craft Ventures

Knock, the leading notification infrastructure provider, announced it has raised a $12 million Series A led by Craft Ventures, bringing the total funding to $18 million. Existing investors Afore Capital and Preface Capital also joined the round. More than 200 enterprises including Webflow, Vercel, Vidyard, and Amplitude depend on Knock to build multi-channel product experiences that drive engagement and retention. As part of the round, David Sacks, co-founder and partner at Craft Ventures, will also join Knock’s Board.

“Knock is the tool we wish we had in our past roles. Every product needs to engage with its customers, but until now, every team has had to build and scale that infrastructure in-house or work with tools not designed for the modern developer workflow. We started Knock to provide developers and product teams with flexible, API-first customer engagement that's ready for production,” said Sam Seely, CEO and co-founder of Knock. “We're excited that this capital will enable us to scale our platform and to help improve notifications for users of software everywhere.”

Founded in 2021, Knock gives developers a customer engagement platform tailored to their workflow. The customer engagement market has grown to $20 billion in recent years. But the majority — from mission-critical banking notifications to conversion-lifting user experiences — still runs on outdated systems that prevent notifications from reaching users at the right moment. Typically, these platforms are sold to marketers, and these high-volume, production-risk systems are often packaged in rigid dashboards that don’t meet developers’ needs. Knock puts notifications in context so engineering teams can manage them as part of their CI environment and deployment pipeline, with better documentation, powerful API primitives, and SDKs to ensure ease of launch and use. Knock’s APIs allow customization that can’t be built anywhere else.

“We share an aligned worldview with the Knock team: we believe in the power of great DX and API-first tooling to deliver business outcomes. Knock has helped us deliver on ours, with an experience that’s great for our team — and our users,” said Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, who is also an angel investor. “I’m proud to be an investor in and a customer of Knock.

“Everyone has seen the notification bell in their apps. It’s ubiquitous as the way to notify users about new activity. The problem is that every app ends up reinventing the wheel, hacking this together, and struggling to maintain it. It would make a lot more sense for developers to outsource their notification infrastructure. Now they can,” said David Sacks, co-founder and partner at Craft Ventures.

ABOUT KNOCK.IO

Knock is the leading notification infrastructure provider for businesses, providing development teams with a better way to build and scale customized notifications while easily integrating into existing workflows. With a focus on building infrastructure for engineers, Knock’s API delivers better user experiences that enable businesses to improve activation, engagement, and retention, allowing teams to focus on core product areas. Founded in 2021 by Sam Seely and Chris Bell, Knock’s investors include Craft Ventures, Afore Capital, Preface Capital, and Guillermo Rauch. For more on Knock, visit https://knock.app/

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