Personalisation is a buzzword for marketers: by treating customers as individuals, tailoring messaging and marketing to their needs and desires, organisations hope to get a much better response. But there’s a problem: having staked the future on apps, betting that customers will download and engage with their software, they’re discovering that personalisation is very difficult to implement in the app world.

That’s the challenge Paul Meinshausen has set out to confront. The co-founder and CEO of Aampe, which has just announced a $7.5 million pre-Series A funding round, Meinshausen believes the marketing industry needs a new approach. “The assumption has been that once someone is inside your app, you can find ways to persuade them to make certain decisions or to transact with you,” he says. “But while everyone has built an app of their own, the technology around personalisation and the customer relationship is remarkably anachronistic.”

The problem, Meinshausen says, is that app builders currently have no option but to depend on rules-based software. If a user interacts with the app in a certain way, a particular response is generated. The aim is to personalise the interaction, but inevitably the scope for this is limited – in a labour-intensive, manual process, only so many responses can be programmed according to the underlying rules.

Aampe, founded in 2020, therefore takes a different approach. Meinshausen and his colleagues have built an artificial intelligence-driven tool that app builders can plug into their creations. The AI learns from app users’ responses – and the responses that the software has seen from other deployments – in order to create genuinely personalised content and messaging for each customer.

“It’s really about helping apps to get smarter,” Meinshausen explains. “Our software finds out what’s important to each customer in order to enable the app to provide a better service and experience on an individual basis.”

The hope, of course, is that this translates into people making more of the decisions that businesses are looking for – more spending via the app, for example. Aampe insists that is exactly what is happening for the customers it has signed up, including companies such as food delivery apps HAAT and Swiggy, the gig economy specialist IntelyCare, fintech PayU, and the retailer ZALORA.

At the latter company, Southeast Asia’s largest retailer, Aampe says it has already helped to drive a 13.2% increase in app visits and a 6.7% increase in additional purchases.

Certainly, many customers are looking for a new approach. Research suggests one in four users only open an app once before abandoning it forever, and the average app loses 77% of its daily active users within the first three days of them installing it. Meanwhile, research from Salesforce suggests 66% of consumers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations, while 52% expect all offers to be personalised.

A business that can square this circle therefore looks set to perform well. Investors in Aampe believe it could be a major beneficiary of this trend – this latest round of fundraising, led by Matrix Partners India and Peak XV Partners, takes the total amount of money raised by the company to more than $9 million.

“Customer engagement and marketing technology has been an early beneficiary of advances in AI and machine learning, and Aampe is a clear front runner in enabling organisations to adopt personalized and result-oriented communication to drive growth,” argues Aakash Kumar, managing director of Matrix Partners India. At Peak XV Partners, partner Anandamoy Roychowdhary adds: “As the world switches from growth at all costs to profitable growth with a solid unit economics profile, the way users are engaged and retained inside an application world has become more important than ever.”

Aampe isn’t the only player in this market, facing competition from a number of specialists in customer relationship management (CRM) software. However, investors are backing Meinshausen’s track record as the successful co-founder of Indian fintech PaySense, sold in 2019 for $185 million. His co-founders at Aampe, Sami Abboud, and Schaun Wheeler, are also well-known entrepreneurs.