Notifications may seem like a solved problem. You’re probably getting more than you want already, after all. Its two founders Hit, Sam Seely and Chris Bell, argue that while many companies have solved the “last mile delivery problem,” there is more work to be done. While products like Twilio and SendGrid may offer developer-friendly APIs, Knock’s founders believe what’s really needed is a more comprehensive solution that combines notification delivery with a comprehensive workflow engine and built-in observability tools.
The company, which launched in 2021, today announced a $12 million funding round led by Craft Ventures. At the launch, the company also raised a previously undisclosed $6 million round led by Afore Capital. Preface Ventures, Worklife, Expa Ventures, CoFound Partners and Tokyo Black also invested in these rounds, as well as angel investors such as Vercel co-founder and CEO Guillermo Rauch and Behance co-founder Scott Belsky.
Image Credits: Hit
“Today, if you’re an engineering team for any type of product — whether it’s SaaS or developer tools or consumer products — there are generic services that used to be built in-house, and now you can go to an API. said Knock CEO Sam Seely. “Now, all the best engineers who want to work in payments are going to work at Stripe. and all the best who want to work in search, go to Algolia. It felt like the notification infrastructure part was exactly what you needed to build at home.”
Seely and Bell told me they went back to the drawing board to see what a modern notification system would look like and what primitives they would have to build. At the end of the day, notifications don’t differentiate most products, but they are very necessary. So if a product like Knock can speed up your development workflow, that’s a win-win.
The real difference for Knock is that it not only provides the tools to send notifications, but also pulls data from third-party tools that can then trigger workflow logic that a developer has defined for their specific use case (such as translating of a message for a global audience).
Image Credits: Hit
“We have a whole workflow engine — that’s really the core of the product,” Seely explained. “That’s where you determine when a trigger occurs. We call the Knock API, run through that workflow, group messages at that rate, limit them so users don’t get spam, and then we send that message in-app, we send that email.”
This workflow engine is accessible through a web-based user interface, but as the team pointed out, all of this functionality is also available programmatically. “A big kind of focus for us is to give that workflow engine that drives cross-channel engagement, but then bring that into the day-to-day developer workflow,” Seely said.
Over time, Knock plans to delve into the customer engagement space as well. The team argues that whenever a new channel emerges, existing players in that space — like SAP’s Exact Target, for example — struggle to catch up.
“Users are tired of the onslaught and barrage of emails and push notifications,” Seely said. “It’s real native product experiences that drive value to users and help companies increase engagement and retention — all the reasons you’re sending notifications in the first place. To augment native in-app experiences, that’s where developer experience matters.” And that’s where Knock believes it can have a significant advantage over incumbents in this market. Seely noted that while the company often sees competitors like Iterative and Customer.io often sold to dealers, the secret to this market is that these tools are often used and maintained primarily by mechanics.
An interesting aspect of the Knock tech stack: It’s written in Elixir language, which is not exactly mainstream. As it turns out, Bell has long been very active in this community and even runs one Elixir podcast. “When I think about fit, in terms of what we’re building and the choice of language, there was no better fit in my mind to use Elixir,” he explained. “Where it shines is this highly simultaneous error-[tolerance] that he brings to the table. When I think about what we do here, the foundation of Erlang is written for telephony systems, routing calls from one place to another.”
The company plans to deploy the new funding to expand its go-to-market efforts and, of course, grow its engineering team. Current clients include Vercel, Amplitude, Hiive and Betterworks.
