Matrixx Software hopes to tap the U.S. wireless market with the launch of a cloud-based platform designed to help carriers sell digital goods and services to their customers.
The Silicon Valley-based startup aims to help telecoms make offers in real time to subscribers based on their mobile behavior or location, and enable them to control features and services directly from their handsets. Matrixx Digital Commerce, as the offering is dubbed, supports bundled content and services from both carriers and third parties, and can handle “billions of personalized customer transactions a day,” according to the company.
“It gives (operators) the ability to package things differently; to mix and match what (customers) want to buy,” Matrixx co-founder and Vice President of Marketing Jennifer Kyriakakis told FierceWireless. “Taking a lot of those classic processes off the table, we really moved it all onto the handset, all online. We created this environment of the telco acting more like a digital marketplace.”
While Matrixx is largely unknown in the U.S., it has seen some traction with carriers overseas. Customers include Vodafone, Swisscom and Australia’s Telstra, and the 9-year-old company also has secured $38.6 million in funding through six rounds from investors including Greylock Partners, Swisscom Ventures and Telstra Ventures.
“One thing that I think is interesting is that our customers, after making the commercial decision to deploy, decided to invest in us,” Kyriakakis said. “As we bring new customers in, that’s always a conversation they want to have.”
Matrixx is beginning to pursue the U.S. market and competes with legacy BSS (billing support systems) providers such as Amdocs and Huawei, among others, Kyriakakis said. And the company hopes to entice American network operators looking to differentiate their offerings in the new era of unlimited-data plans.
“We initially did see a lot of challenges with (the U.S.) market. It was a steady market for a long time; the biggest carriers were not experiencing the issues with revenues and margins that the rest of the world does,” she said. “But unlimited is a race to the bottom, right? All of (our) customers are delivering so much value to their customers…. By treating the network as a no-value asset, you’re not building any value for the subscriber.”