Klaviyo

a Shopify partnership worth $9B

Author

Stan Rymkiewicz
August 10, 2023

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How Klaviyo grew to $9.5B with distribution partnerships

Klaviyo is a marketing automation platform for DTC companies. They consolidated emails, SMS, push, & reviews with one platform and used partnerships to grow to a $9.5B valuation. They raised $770M from Shopify, Accel, and Summit Partners.

Klaviyo’s GTM strategy

Product

Klaviyo started as an email marketing for ecommerce brands. They have positioned themselves as the DTC growth tool with a smart engine to build automation based on customer data.

Think of it as Hubspot for DTC.

Marketing automation

Distribution

Klaviyo started to grow after the plugged into the biggest trend in 2018 — Shopify. Initially, they did focus on software startups but bigger traction started once they went deep into one vertical (ecommerce). Combining strong positioning within the DTC companies market with a distribution partnership from Shopify they caught two major trends at once.

This is another example of having multiple trends and GTM strategies stacked on top of each other.

DTC positioning

Market

The marketing automation market is only worth $5B and growing 18% annually which would be too small for them to beat as they already surpassed market value ($5B) with valuation ($9.5).

My bet is that they pitched the ecommerce market (worth $16T) which makes them worthy of the $9.5B price tag — especially with the MailChimp acquisition.

Additional resources

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