Chatitive Completes New Funding

Essential Platform Services, Inc. announces that effective July 31, 2018 the company has changed its name to Chatitive, Inc. The name change reflects the company's focus on helping businesses introduce new, dynamic company-customer interactions across the mobile customer lifecycle, using conversational text messaging that consumers use every day.

"Chatitive is a new way for companies to engage with their customers over messaging, based on meaningful and purposeful conversations that lead to action – dramatically increasing loyalty, engagement, responsiveness and value," says Mike McMurray, co-founder and CEO of Chatitive. "Businesses using the Chatitive platform for conversational text messaging have a 98% open rate and see response rates 60 times faster than email. Most importantly for businesses, by encouraging customer feedback and interaction, Chatitive campaigns result in 25 times the response rate of emails."

Businesses are using text messaging powered by Chatitive across the customer lifecycle including social media acquisition, mobile customer onboarding, messaging-based conversational commerce, personalization and customer support. Chatitive's platform is built to allow businesses new to messaging to start quickly and scale, and for businesses already using outbound messaging to add new, powerful conversational capability to existing experiences.

"We've built a best-in-class messaging platform that leverages technologies including artificial intelligence, natural language processing, machine learning and chatbots to create conversations that feel natural to consumers and help them quickly and easily engage in a conversation with the brand," adds Daniel Pirone, co-founder and VP of Engineering.

Chatitive was incubated by Madrona Venture Labs and spun off as an independent company in the spring of 2016 with an initial investment from Madrona Venture Group. In the fall of 2017, Chatitive received additional funding from Madrona Venture Group and also angel investment from several prominent Seattle investors including former RootMetrics Co-Founder & Chief Revenue Officer Andy Hollenbeck, former RootMetrics Chairman and McCaw executive Scott Anderson and former PointMarc CEO Arsenio Valdez.

Today, Chatitive is also announcing new investment from Unlock Venture Partners (https://unlockvp.com) and existing shareholders to accelerate customer development and to continue to deepen the complexity of conversational engagement supported by the platform. Unlock is a new early stage venture firm founded by a team of successful serial entrepreneurs and experienced technology angel investors with a focus on emerging opportunities in Seattle and Los Angeles.

"At Unlock, we invest in experienced teams who have conviction and expertise on how best to utilize data and AI to create valuable products. Chatitive checks all those boxes for us with their integrated and customer focused intelligent messaging platform. We are excited to support the Chatitive team in continuing to diversify their customer base and quickly grow market share," said Andy Liu, Partner at Unlock.

About Chatitive

Chatitive [http://www.chatitive.com/] is an intelligent conversational messaging company that provides an integrated SaaS platform for mobile customer engagement. Chatitive was incubated at Seattle-based startup studio, Madrona Venture Labs, and spun out in 2016 with financing from Madrona Venture Group. The Chatitive intelligent messaging platform helps businesses rewrite their playbook on company-customer interactions by creating a new, dynamic communication channel for mobile customers based on meaningful and purposeful conversations that lead to action – dramatically increasing loyalty, engagement, responsiveness and value.