charles acquires Spectrm

charles acquires Spectrm to accelerate GenAI-offering within E2E conversational marketing platform.
 

Berlin, Germany — January 16, 2024 — charles, a leading provider of WhatsApp marketing automation software in Europe announced its acquisition of Spectrm, prominent for its AI-focused conversational marketing capabilities via Facebook Messenger and Instagram Direct. Spectrm complements charles’ current offering and accelerates their path to an end-to-end conversational marketing automation solution spanning the whole consumer journey from acquisition to conversion and retention. Jointly, they will be offering fully automated Gen-AI driven sales and support conversations, next to marketing automation across messengers for leading consumer brands globally.
 
“This is a breakthrough for conversational brand-to-consumer experiences. Many of today’s conversational AI solutions either lack deep and performant integrations to make it truly proprietary and personal or a multi-layered approach to safeguard the answers given by the AI. With this acquisition we continue to pioneer how anything that used to happen between consumer and brand in-store, on-phone or in-web moves into our favorite messaging apps – driven by GenAI!” Andreas Tussing, CEO charles
 
While both businesses operate in conversational marketing for leading consumer brands they have focused on different technological edges and use cases for their customers. 
 
charles excels in WhatsApp marketing automation to drive customer retention. Its technology offers effective means to generate a growing subscriber base from website or in-store traffic, that then is often getting linked to an existing customer database (often CRM, CDP, or shop system). Subsequently those subscribers can be nurtured with various automated use cases such as abandoned cart, birthday campaigns, back in stock etc. Most brands combine this with charles’ promotional campaigning features and leverage advanced attribution mechanisms leading to a Revenue per recipient of such marketing messages of €2.30 on average (compared to WhatsApp cost of €0.1131 in e.g. Germany).
 
Spectrm is positioned earlier on in the customer journey and has been a trailblazer in leveraging conversational AI for customer acquisition across Facebook and Instagram Messenger, deeply synchronized with Meta’s Ad Manager and CMOs’ performance marketing budgets. Often the journey starts with an Ad focused around a more open AI-driven conversation with goals such as consumer engagement, recommendation, and lead generation. 
 
Brand & Enterprise AI Safety
 
One of the biggest drivers of the transaction for charles was Spectrm’s special focus on brand and enterprise safety within their GenAI approach. Their hybrid ‘SafeMatch’ technology ensures that conversational GenAI-agents stay within enterprise brand guidelines and out of hallucinations or politically and morally sensitive topics. An approach that won the trust of global players like Volkswagen, The Premier League, or BMW during their Superbowl campaign. This strategy also complements well with charles’ long-standing emphasis on data privacy as a strong European player, processing millions of conversations for consumer brands like Dermalogica, HelloFresh or ABOUT YOU. 
 
“Messaging is everywhere, and with AI unlocking new possibilities, the shift is happening faster than ever. It’s no surprise that Meta is all in. We’re excited to lead the change with charles in shaping the future of business messaging as an end-to-end-solution.” Max Koziolek, CEO Spectrm
 
The acquisition happens during WhatsApp’s Business ecosystem being on the brink of a transformative shift. With over 80% year-over-year growth, the combined offering around business messaging has become Meta’s fastest-growing product and is on track to account for more than 20% of their revenue next year – while getting combined deeply with their advertising products (e.g. Ads that click to a WhatsApp conversation). CMOs and marketing teams around the world are integrating conversational marketing solutions as a vital part of their marketing stack and performance & CRM budgets. This is also driven by consumers’ habits becoming more conversational and businesses need to lower customer acquisition cost, while growing lifetime revenue. GenAI is increasing the possibilities and speed of how this can be tackled in messenger apps.
 
The origin of charles and Spectrm’s relationship is rooted in a personal connection that began during university between Spectrm’s co-founder, Max Koziolek and Artjem Weissbeck, co-founder of charles — who stayed in touch about how to potentially combine their conversational marketing offerings. Given that charles and Spectrm’s offices are only 15 minutes apart from each other, the acquisition also solidifies Berlin’s position as a hub for innovation in this space. While foundational research for conversational AI and LLMs may be happening elsewhere, Berlin is where these technologies are being turned into scalable, consumer-facing conversational marketing solutions. 
 
“While we’ve had interest from global AI and advertising players, it was clear from the start that charles is a great cultural and vision fit. Having known Andreas and Artjem for so long, we often talked about a combined platform. Now, together, we have the chance to make that vision a reality.” Jendrik Höft, COO Spectrm

 
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about charles

charles is a leading European WhatsApp marketing platform shaping the way businesses connect with their customers by unlocking the full potential of WhatsApp as a key sales and CRM channel. The company was founded by Andreas Tussing and Artjem Weissbeck and is backed by Accel, HV Capital and Salesforce Ventures with >30M€ in financing. 

about spectrm

Spectrm is a premier messaging marketing software for consumer enterprises, known for its advanced AI technologies for Facebook and Instagram Messenger and their international presence across Europe/UK and the U.S. The company was founded by Max Koziolek and Jendrik Höft.
 
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umal.nasir@hello-charles.com (Head of Marketing)