The news: Customer experience platform Insider (no relation to our company) achieved unicorn status by tripling its valuation to $1.22 billion as part of a $121 million Series D funding round announced today. The company works with 1000+ brands, including Samsung, Santander, Ikea, and Estée Lauder to accelerate digital growth.

• The company, whose CEO is entrepreneur Hande Cilingir, also became one of the few female-led software as a service (SaaS) unicorns in the world with this financial milestone.
• The funds will be used to power the company's global expansion—with a concerted effort on the competitive US market—improve its core technology, and scale international sales and marketing investments. Insider expects to add over 2,000 employees globally over the next four years, with a focus on attracting women for hundreds of engineering and product roles.

More on this: While the company may not be as well known as competitors such as Adobe, SAP, Selligent, and Braze, Insider's AI-powered platform purports to have the most comprehensive personalization capabilities with communications channels including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, RCS, and SMS. The technology unites offline and internet data on a single platform, allowing enterprise marketers to connect customer data, forecast behavior, and execute personalized customer experiences.

Zoom out: According to an October 2021 Zendesk study, 48% of more than 450 decision-makers in North America strongly agree that continuous CX innovation is needed to prevent losing customers to competitors, with an additional 41% agreeing.

• At 49%, the top customer engagement priority among US B2C marketers was to establish more meaningful connections, according to a 2021 Demand Metric study.

The big takeaway: As more brands realize that personalized engagement is going from a nice-to-have to table stakes, CX leaders like Insider stand to substantially increase their year-over-year growth for the foreseeable future.