Subscription Platform Chargebee Acquires Brightback

Subscription management platform Chargebee announced Tuesday (Jan. 18) it had acquired customer retention platform Brightback.

The company says the move combines “two best-in-class platforms to maximize revenue growth capabilities for global customers,” and follows Chargebee’s recent acquisition of RevLock, a revenue recognition company.

“During the pandemic, we saw a huge uptick in new customers for subscription businesses around the globe. As the world continues to reopen, a challenge facing many of those businesses is now how to retain and expand those customer relationships,” Krish Subramanian, CEO and co-founder of Chargebee, said in a news release.

The company points to research from Gartner projecting that by next year, 75% of direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands will offer subscription services, while just 20% will succeed in boosting customer retention.

Learn more: Subscriptions Platform Chargebee Lands $125 Million In Venture Funding

By combining their services, the two companies can let merchants use subscriber data to set up automated workflows and machine learning to personalize customer experiences, retain users and boost revenues.

“Brightback’s integration partnership with Chargebee has enabled some of the fastest-growing startups, including Hopin, TouchNote, and ScreenCloud, to quickly launch and evolve high-performance retention flows,” said Guy Marion, CEO and founder of Brightback.

“Our companies have similar growth goals and our mission and values are very aligned, so we look forward to accelerating the adoption of customer retention best practices and benchmarks across the industry, while smoothly transitioning into the Chargebee family.”

Chargebee says Brightback’s team will join its workers in offices around the world — as well as working remotely — with Brightback’s executives team joining Chargebee’s leadership.

Founded in 2011, Chargebee’s serves more than 3,500 subscription-based businesses, helping automated their revenue operations. The company’s clients include Okta, Freshworks, Calendly and Study.com.

Last year, Chargebee raised $125 million in Series G funding, a round designed to fuel the firm’s expansion efforts and valuing the company a $1.4 billion.