Wellington’s Atomic explodes on the global scene

Nick Hearn (Atomic)

Wellington-based Atomic, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider of in-app customer experience technology, is moving beyond the ‘start-up’ and going into scale-up mode as it grows beyond A/NZ.

Started four years ago, Atomic was the brainchild of Rod Drury, founder of Xero, who needed a solution that would fundamentally change the behaviour of how accountants and business owners were doing what they needed to do.

"Rod had this vision - we have the data on what our customers need to do to be successful. Why not surface them up as actions in little bite-size pieces of UI that customers can seamlessly and easily get done?" said Atomic's chief revenue officer (CRO) Nick Hearn. 

Atomic “enables organisations to send timely, personalised, targeted, and actionable messages inside their existing apps that their customers can immediately take action on,” Hearn said. 

It combines out of app push notifications taking users to specific in-app actions embedded inside existing apps, and connects with an organisation’s existing customers, data and marketing platforms.

Achieving 100 per cent year-on-year growth this year, Hearn says Atomic is aiming to achieve that again next year, and believes it is on track to do so. 

Within two and a half years of going to market, Atomic now boasts ANZ, BNZ, KiwiBank, Kiwi Wealth, Southern Cross Health and Foodstuffs as its major customers. It also has a “pretty sizeable” client in the US, Hearn said.

With its head office in Wellington, Atomic describes itself as a remote-first global company. According to Hearn, Atomic has recently established a footprint in Australia with aims to grow there, alongside early discussions with potential customers in the UK.

Atomic currently has 25 staff across these locations and plans to double that within the next 12 to 18 months, with purposeful hiring in mind to develop and maintain the right team culture, Hearn said.

“Our real point of difference is empowering customers to get things done in secure channels – there’s a lot of fraud and security threats out there with SMS messaging and email. There’s a reason people have an app – they want to interact securely with the brand, with the products and services that they love, and they want to be able to know what and when to do it.

“Atomic empowers organisations to do that inside their app using low code, with minimal development effort.”

A key part of Atomic’s go-to-market strategy is growing its partnerships, Hearn said, naming AWS and Deloitte as two partnerships that are currently on the go.

“There is a strong opportunity for technical and thought leadership consulting and implementation partnership to be leveraged off the back of the Atomic platform,” he said.

Market demand for Atomic’s offering is clear, with Hearn noting that despite tightened market conditions, increasingly sophisticated fraud and security threats mean customers are looking for solutions that can provide security and confidence more than ever.

“There’s a reason people download an organisation’s app, and that’s to get things done. But fundamentally, these apps are typically failing customers – a call to action will push them to a call centre, or push them to a branch, or to dial into a more comprehensive form-based experience on the web.

“What Atomic enables you to do is to shift all of that back into the app in a secure way without compromising the performance and look and feel of the app.”