MoEngage Builds Market-Leading AI Marketing App on AWS

MoEngage was born on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, choosing the platform for its reliability, ease of use, and rate of community adoption. Security was another key factor as MoEngage captures and processes millions of customer engagement events every hour for its customers. The company uses Amazon GuardDuty and other built-in tools such as multi-factor authentication, and identity and access management.

Particularly for enterprise customers in the US and European Union—both rapidly growing markets for MoEngage—having in-country data centers ensures compliance with data sovereignty rules such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). “When we say that we are using AWS, most prospective customers’ security questions are already answered. When they need certification, we send them AWS artifacts that are readily available online,” says Yashwanth Kumar, CTO at MoEngage, referring to the oft-requested ISO 27001 compliance certificate and the SOC 2 Report from AWS.

Data and analytics are at the core of the MoEngage product. The startup helps its clients become data-driven, using its proprietary AI tools to recommend the best time, message content, and format to communicate with each type of customer. It uses Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink to generate actionable insights and found the Random Cut Forest feature particularly useful for detecting data anomalies. “We didn’t have to know much about data science, but AWS provides a template straight out of the box to do the work,” Kumar says.

Kumar’s team also uses Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) in conjunction with AWS Lambda for serverless computing and the auto-execution of algorithms. AWS Lambda interacts with customer data stored in Amazon DynamoDB to produce real-time feedback, powering MoEngage’s AI algorithms. Recently, MoEngage has adopted Amazon Athena to refine serverless queries. “We didn’t have a proper log-searching mechanism, but after implementing Amazon Athena we have reduced our search time from 15 minutes to less than 30 seconds,” Kumar says.

When MoEngage was launched, time-to-market and funding were top concerns for the company’s founders. Their strategy was to first secure a purchase commitment from potential customers and then design the initial iteration of the MoEngage app. The business qualified for The Alchemist Accelerator venture-backed funding and joined the AWS Activate program, which included the credits, training, and business support needed to quickly get the operation up and running.

“This was a fantastic start as we did not have to worry about money or how much infrastructure we were using. We just focused on getting our product to market and designing our solution properly,” Kumar explains. Once the first customer committed to using MoEngage, the team was able to take the product from conceptualization to live in less than a week.

MoEngage has a large presence in Southeast Asia but is seeing a dramatic uptick in customers from Europe, the US, and the Middle East. The business has been growing 30 percent month-on-month, with application traffic following a similar pattern. Scaling has never been an issue, and the startup has maintained a consistent service level agreement of 99.99 percent since launching.

Like many mobile applications, MoEngage’s daily traffic is often unpredictable, going from 1.5 million requests per minute to more than double that at times. Kumar says, “That’s where AWS helps us. We’re able to launch as many machines as needed at any given time, and there was never a moment when there were no machines to serve our traffic.” Auto-scaling to accommodate such spikes supports the company’s mobile-first strategy and gives founders the confidence to enter new markets. They are also able to keep costs low to attract new users. “With AWS, we have complete transparency around our build and usage, and the AWS team is more than happy to give us suggestions on how to reduce costs. AWS continues to launch new instance types that are cheaper than earlier versions, and with better performance,” he adds.

MoEngage supports continuous innovation, bringing users new features that are designed to enhance conversion rates and better track customer behavior. The company has recently launched a recommendations engine for retail users that is built on Amazon Personalize. Founders appreciate the innovation mindset shared with AWS and together with their AWS account rep, they have completed a development roadmap and a well-architected review of their infrastructure—an activity Kumar describes as an “eye-opening experience.”

“Innovation is continuously taking place at AWS, and we are happy to offload some tech work to focus on making our customers happy,” Kumar shares. “If we had tried to build our own recommendations engine outside Amazon Personalize, for example, we would have needed a dedicated four- to five-member team. With AWS, we are able to minimize staffing levels and guarantee a reliable solution from the start.”

In February 2019, MoEngage became further integrated with the AWS ecosystem by becoming a Digital Customer Experience (DCX) Competency Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN).

Selected for its excellence in marketing automation and recognized customer retention solution, the startup hopes to leverage the APN program to multiple ends. First, DCX market development funding is helping drive awareness of the MoEngage product and build pipelines in existing and new industry verticals. Next, management is deriving value from the ability to craft integrated go-to-market strategies with other DCX partners offering complementary mobile solutions.

Reflecting on the company’s journey, Kumar concludes, “We are a happy customer of AWS and are excited about the innovation that keeps happening. I can’t imagine building MoEngage without AWS.”