Exclusive: No-code platform Plotline bags seed to make data-driven, dynamic apps

As enterprises race to drive customer engagement to boost revenues, Plotline, a young startup from California, is solving the challenge with another approach: data-driven dynamic app experiences. The company today announced $2.6 million in seed funding from Elevation Capital.

While most companies already have the resources to customize apps, the process they follow is very slow. Plotline bridges this gap with a no-code platform, which has the potential to speed up implementation and experimentation across applications by as much as 10x.  

“We have helped companies significantly improve their product adoption and activation rates by as much as 25-30%. We regularly see companies running 50-150 experiments a month and find ways to boost their metrics,” Shubham Jindal, the co-founder of the company, told VentureBeat.

Solving the challenge of in-app personalization

Today, consumer-facing apps have become more complicated than ever. Companies are moving aggressively to add new capabilities, offers and content, but not all functionalities are making it to the end users. Some find it hard to discover the changes, while others remain entirely unaware. These behavioral gaps often call for in-app customizations.

Traditionally, when marketing teams had to customize in-app experiences, multiple teams, including product, design, engineering and data, had to jump in and collaborate. The process took months, which delayed deployment and hit revenue prospects. Not to mention, the long, multi-step collaboration also made it impossible to act on real-time information.

Plotline solves this problem with a plug-and-play platform that connects data about user behavior, preferences and attributes – enabling precise insights into each user’s stage and interaction patterns – and uses that information in real-time to activate personalized UX patterns within the service in question. 

“Plotline integrates directly with apps to collect data… We provide an SDK that supports major mobile platforms – Android, iOS, React Native, Flutter and Ionic. Additionally, Plotline integrates with major customer data platforms (CDPs) and analytics platforms like Segment, RudderStack, Mixpanel, and Amplitude. This rich information allows enterprise teams to tailor the app experience effectively and measure the impact of deployed strategies on user behavior,” Jindal explained.

To tailor the app experience, the platform provides users with a simple interface, where they can define rules for who should be targeted, based on streaming data, and create a multi-step flow of UX actions with a few clicks. This can include a range of patterns, from nudges to drive up user activation and product adoption to media and gamification components aimed at strengthening engagement. As a result, whenever a user triggers the pre-defined event, they see a prespecified UX element. Imagine getting a 30% discount offer when trying to return from the checkout page of a service.

Jindal says the company’s backend engine comprises a stream processor and a columnar database that ensures real-time data processing with a latency of just 50ms.

Early adoption across different markets

Plotline started as a feedback platform to help product managers improve their offerings. However, after working with initial customers, Jindal and the other co-founder, Adarsh Tadimari, found that many users were not even aware of all the functionalities their apps had on offer. This led them to pivot Plotline into a platform for building dynamic apps. 

Since the shift in 2023, the company has garnered significant traction from over 50 global companies, including Dream11, Khatabook, BharatPe, CoinDCX, Niyo, Kredivo and US-based fintech firm Step. These brands cumulatively serve over 150 million end users.

“We brought in Plotline to increase onboarding and product adoption within our app. Only a few weeks in, Plotline has helped us effortlessly create in-app experiences and significantly reduce the burden on internal teams. We can move faster and have seen strong conversions on our early campaigns,” Carter Hansen, head of marketing at Step, said in a statement.

As the next step, Plotline plans to build on this work. The company said it will use the seed round to bolster R&D, marketing and sales efforts and expand the reach of the product across the US, Middle East, Africa and Asia-Pacific regions. 

“Currently, our product offers several UX patterns that are plug-and-play – which allow for personalized onboarding assistance, gamification, nudges and more. We’re not stopping here, being within the app allows us to provide more flexibility than any other communication channel today. We want to give our customers the tools to tweak and tailor all parts of the app. In Q3 of this year, we’re launching automated discovery of segments and creation of UI using LLMs, allowing apps to become dynamic like never before,” Jindal said.