Welcome to the New Kibo!
As you may have heard, Kibo has spun off the personalization business, which now operates as its own entity under the Monetate Brand. As Kibo’s CTO turned CEO, here’s my take on this exciting announcement:
In late 2018, Kibo set out to build the market’s only personalized commerce cloud. The bringing of market-leading personalization solutions into our unified commerce platform was well-received in the market at the time.
The pandemic caused a fair amount of changes in the market and sped up digital transformations in a way that we’ve never seen before, changing how companies view, buy, implement, and manage commerce solutions.
We found that the buyers and markets we originally served together were naturally beginning to bifurcate and as such our business operations did as well. The adoption of long-tail strategies like headless and composable was rapidly advanced by changing consumer needs.
As we reassessed our offering against our central strategy in commerce, we made the strategic decision to spin off the Personalization business, allowing us to reinvest into and hyper-focus on our core eCommerce, order management, and subscription commerce solutions. As a fully modular, API-first platform, Kibo will be in an even stronger position to serve B2C, B2B, and D2C customers with modern solutions.
This move will unlock the potential for us to build faster on the growth, market momentum, and recognition we have received from analysts like Forrester and Gartner in the past two years.
Current and future Kibo customers will benefit from additional investment in our products and the infrastructure to better support their digital transformation journeys. We will be focused on continuing to build the breadth and depth of commerce capabilities to drive the next generation of digital commerce leaders.
Current and future tech partners will recognize the value of this spin-off too. While we will maintain our product’s integration and partnership with Monetate, this opens the door for Kibo to truly expand our opportunities to partner with other personalization and digital commerce leaders that complement our composable commerce products.
From a financial aspect, this transaction allows Kibo to fully focus our investments on our go-to-market strategy and the areas of our business that align with our long-term vision for commerce. It will also allow Kibo to become debt-free in an environment that is more important than ever.
It is truly an exciting new day here at Kibo, and I could not be prouder to continue our vision as we embark on changing the face of commerce. I look forward to leading our new executive leadership team into the future with renewed vigor. More exciting news to come – stay tuned.
About Ram Venkataraman
Ram has spent more than 25 years of his career working in working at software companies that range from bootstrapped startups to public companies. As Kibo’s CEO, he is focused on building an organization that can maximize its potential. He’s held senior executive positions for more than a decade driving product and technology functions. Prior to this, he was at NCR where he was the CTO of the NCR payment platforms. He has a BS in Electronics Engineering from the University of Mumbai.
