Photo: Hande Cilingir, Co-Founder and CEO at Insider.
Insider, a leading AI-native omnichannel experience and customer engagement platform, today announced a $500 Million Series E funding round led by General Atlantic, a leading global growth investor.
The funds will be used to invest heavily in AI to deliver against the most ambitious AI roadmap. The company also intends to scale its talent base and geographic footprint in The UAE and Middle East by investing dh 462M and creating 70 jobs by 2027. At the same time, it will actively pursue M&A opportunities. The company will also significantly invest in R&D, accelerate growth, and scale global sales and marketing initiatives across the 28 regions it operates in across five continents.
Following a period of phenomenal growth and notable customer wins in the region, Insider serves some of the region’s best-loved brands, including Emirated NBD, Nayomi, Kavak, and Air Arabia.
“Our success lies in consistently delivering unmatched value for our customers, driven by the Insider Advantage a powerful combination of industry-first technologies, local award-winning customer support, a seamless migration experience, and white-glove onboarding services. With the most ambitious product roadmap and AI strategy, Insider is experiencing phenomenal growth, as an increasing number of Middle Eastern brands make the switch to Insider. It is an incredibly exciting time to come on board both as a client and as a member of the team,” said Ajish Pillai, Commercial Director at Insider.
“Our mission is to make marketing and CX teams feel unstoppable when it comes to omnichannel experience and customer engagement. This historic funding will enable us to achieve that in two prominent ways,” said Hande Cilingir, Co-Founder and CEO at Insider.
“Firstly, the funds will be used to fuel our AI strategy. Insider has been a leader in AI for more than a decade; so we were in a prime position to incorporate #GenerativeAI natively within our platform. Generative AI will end a prolonged era of scarcity in marketing and customer experience. It will enable teams to tap into endless abundance by multiplying their resources and automating repetitive work. We are on the brink of an AI era that will truly disrupt the martech industry, and Insider will be the disruptive force leading it.”
“Secondly, we will further strengthen our unique position in the market as the leading AI-native compound SaaS business. Unlike traditional technology companies that focus on a single area or product, our approach has always been to build multiple best-in-breed products, bringing them together in a single platform that outperforms single-point solutions in every way. These two differentiators will boldly set Insider apart as the #1 choice for marketing and customer experience teams.” Cilingir added.
Insider is the leading AI-native Omnichannel Experience and Customer Engagement Platform that brings together best-of-breed and industry-first technologies into one platform, enabling teams to deliver a unique experience per person. With an integrated CDP that vertically integrates data and marketing application layers to fuel marketing automation and personalized customer journey orchestration across 12+ natively-supported channels, like WhatsApp, SMS, Email, Web, App, Site Search, and more. Insider helps marketers to efficiently collect, analyze, and predictively use first-party data in real time. As a result, brands accelerate growth, realize higher productivity, maximize ROI, increase customer lifetime value, and create more valuable customer relationships.
Insider promises unparalleled ease of set-up and ease of use, offering the fastest time-to-value to help teams reach their peak potential.
The company launched, patent-pending, Sirius AI™, the world’s most comprehensive AI solution for end-to-end omnichannel experience creation. It combines the transformative power of generative, conversational, and predictive AI to scale teams significantly, increasing productivity, uncovering new revenue opportunities, and unlocking higher levels of profitable growth.
“This funding will help accelerate our ambitious product and AI roadmap by growing our 350+ in-house engineering team with an additional 200 AI and Machine Learning engineers and data scientists. Over the next two years, we plan to focus on realizing our vision to build an end-to-end AI-native omnichannel experience and customer engagement platform that compounds promotional, transactional, and support capabilities into a seamless solution powered by an extensive set of channels. Harnessing Generative AI to make user interactions more conversational at every level, we plan to further invest in Sirius AITM Co-Pilot, which guides teams at every stage of customer journey creation,” said Muharrem Derinkok, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Insider.
“Many brands are eager to move away from traditional marketing clouds that limit their growth. We are on a mission to help as many businesses as possible transition from legacy marketing clouds to Insider. We have developed a white-glove migration blueprint designed to make the transition seamless. In the last year, 150 brands have successfully made the switch to Insider from traditional cloud players, using our automatic migrator and pre-built integrations, and achieved up to 5X faster time to value compared to their previous vendor,” said Serhat Soyuerel, Co-Founder and CRO at Insider.
Sascha Guenther, Managing Director and Head of DACH at General Atlantic, commented, “The MarTech industry is benefitting from a secular shift levered to ongoing tailwinds, including the proliferation of data traffic and channels, the growing importance of first-party data, and evolving customer expectations regarding personalized experiences across channels. Insider has successfully positioned itself as a leading and dynamic innovator in the B2B SaaS space and delivers tangible ROI to its customers. We believe the company is well placed to capture a greater share of the $15+ billion total addressable market, as businesses race to upgrade their marketing strategies around the world in need for higher marketing efficiency and effectiveness.”
Alex Crisses, Managing Director, Enterprise Technology, and Global Head of New Investment Sourcing at General Atlantic, continued, “Insider has disrupted traditional marketing cloud operators in the enterprise space by offering a differentiated and well-integrated suite of next-gen products. Insider’s success lies in consistently delivering unmatched value to their customers. Few platforms are capable of achieving this, setting Insider apart. We believe Hande and her team are exceptional product visionaries and entrepreneurs, and we’re excited to help them scale further.”
Insider’s announcement today marks the single largest funding round received by a woman-founded MarTech unicorn in history. Remarking on the news, Cilingir said, “This is an extraordinary milestone not only for Insider, but for the entire technology industry, and the women within it. When we started Insider, we sought not only to create a product company but to build the world’s most socially progressive technology community. This investment is not just about capital—it’s about recognizing that diverse leadership creates stronger companies, and stronger companies create a better future. At Insider, we recognize our responsibility to lead with purpose, empower others, and make sure that rounds like these are not an exception.”
