Investing in...Reactiv

Over the last decade, the growth of mobile commerce has been on a seemingly unstoppable upward trajectory, reaching $2.2 trillion and accounting for 60% of all ecommerce sales globally in 2023. 

Despite these numbers, building a mobile app remains a challenge for many brands, presenting an assortment of friction points for consumers and businesses alike. From high costs (businesses spend about $500k on average for a manual build), to months-long development timelines, to low download numbers – the market is ripe for improving how companies build and launch mobile apps. It reminds me of the early days of my career at a New York digital agency, building bespoke, inefficient CMS systems and intranets and expensive landing pages.

That’s why we are so excited to announce the investment in Reactiv, as they build out their seamless, AI-powered mobile commerce infrastructure for ecommerce brands looking to launch mobile apps and app clips.

What’s an app clip? Glad you asked! An app clip is a paired down version of an app that allows users to engage with some aspect of its content or utility without ever downloading the full version. App clips, therefore, are discoverable only when needed. App clips are particularly exciting as a (relatively) nascent technology for their ability to circumvent download friction, providing consumers with a significantly better mobile user experience. 

The Reactiv platform offers a new way for ecommerce companies to approach building mobile apps and launch their own app clips – automating the build, management and maintenance of both. That way, customers can go live within days, without the headaches associated with mobile app maintenance. 

Reactiv accomplishes this feat through its proprietary AI tooling which extracts information from a company’s existing website, automatically converting it into features and sections of a mobile app. Brands need only to update their website for new content for changes to be dynamically reflected on the mobile app. This value prop alone – that brands no longer need to have two sets of content updated on their website vs mobile app – is a huge time and cost saver for merchants. Alleviating app maintenance has been a major driver of Reactiv’s early success landing and retaining customers.

Reactiv’s platform uniquely enables brands to easily and seamlessly launch their own app clips, giving merchants the ability to retain first party data and, importantly, send push notifications up to 8 hours after someone has engaged with one of their ads. Because push notifications are an incredibly performative method of retargeting (boosting app engagement by 88%), a step-function like change in utility could lead to real industry evolution. This represents not only major potential upside for Reactiv (the market opportunity is ample: there are 14m ecommerce businesses in the US alone), but also speaks to the promise of app clips becoming a standard element of ecommerce tech stacks everywhere. 

Reactiv was co-founded by proven ecommerce and app-building vets: CEO Ross Correia (ex-Plobal Apps, ex-Splitit and ex-Shopify) and partnership leader Zack Elias, (ex-Director of Partnerships at Plobal and ex-Shopify). Ross is leveraging years of deep expertise in sales, technology and customer relationship management and has hit the ground running. Together, Ross, Zach and the their team are ready to disrupt the $400bn mobile ad industry.