Beamer buys Userflow to build a consolidated product engagement platform

It’s M&A season in a tough tech jobs market.

This morning, Beamer, a Boulder, Colorado-based company developing tools for businesses to reach users through their apps (e.g. via push notifications), announced that it’s acquiring Userflow, a user onboarding software startup, for $60 million.

Beamer CEO Satya Ganni says that the purchase, which is being financially supported by Arsenal Growth Equity and Camber Partners, Beamer’s lead investor, will expand Beamer’s capabilities by offering a consolidated toolkit for product teams.

“First and foremost, current customers of Beamer and Userflow should know that this partnership will allow each company to better serve the needs of their existing customer bases before anything,” he told TechCrunch via email. “Hopefully, with a shared vision and demand from both customer bases, both products will continue to evolve to better serve the needs of both existing and future customers, as the market has confirmed demand for a connected suite of tools that include the features of Beamer and Userflow, among others, and serves the needs of product organizations around the world.”

Userflow, headquartered in San Francisco, was founded in 2019 by Sebastian Seilund and Esben Friis-Jensen. Prior to joining Userflow, Seilund helped to start Billy, an accounting software vendor, and spent around a year at Google as a software engineer. Friis-Jensen previously co-launched Cobalt, an app security platform, and before that was a consultant at Accenture in the SAP division.

Userflow provides a suite of modules to create product onboarding experiences — experiences incorporating checklists, polls, product tours and more. Using the platform, developers — and non-developers — can add in-app help guides and feature announcements to new and existing apps, with a content editor supporting multimedia including links, live customer support chat, images and videos.

One of Userflow’s more unique capabilities is automated triggers; developers can set up a trigger to perform actions, such as going to the next step in an onboarding flow, when users click an element or type into a text field. Elsewhere, Userflow can facilitate surveys and collect metrics that can be funneled in an analytics tool such as Amplitude or Mixpanel.

Userflow was entirely bootstrapped prior to today, Seilund noted.

“This is a proud moment for us at Userflow after embarking on this journey in 2019,” he said, adding that there aren’t plans to reduce headcount. “Joining forces with Beamer and aligning with Camber’s vision opens up brand new and exciting opportunities for our customers. We’re impressed with Beamer’s comprehensive toolkit and excited about the combined potential to serve our global customer base even better.”

In any event, Userflow seems to fit right in with Beamer’s product vision. Beamer, founded in 2017 by Mariano Rodriguez and Spencer Coon and backed by $20 million in venture capital, aims to help teams building apps, services and software to highlight new capabilities, prioritize what to build next and collect user feedback.

Beamer’s business has benefited from an industry-wide shift in focus to customer retention. A recent survey from OneSignal, a customer engagement platform, found that 95% of product and marketing experts believe retention is either “very important” or “somewhat important” to their businesses. The reason? It’s nearly a surefire way to boost revenue. According to research done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company, increasing retention by just 5% can boost profits by between 25% and 95%.

Beamer competes with a number of product engagement platforms on the market, including Batch, which raised $23 million in 2021. But with the Userflow acquisition, Beamer’s that much more differentiated — and better positioned, one would think, to go after a sector that could be worth $33.11 billion in 2028, up from $19.73 billion in 2023, according to Mordor Intelligence.