SendGrid

SendGrid is a Boulder, Colorado-based transactional email delivery and management service.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6]} The company was founded by Isaac Saldana, Jose Lopez, and Tim Jenkins in 2009, and incubated through the TechStars accelerator program.^{[7][8][9][10]} As of 2013, SendGrid has raised over $27 million and has offices in Boulder, Denver, Anaheim, and London, and operations in New York City and San Francisco.^{[6][10][11][12][13][14][15]}

General

SendGrid provides a cloud-based email delivery service that assists businesses with transactional email management while abiding by anti-spam regulations.^{[5][7][16][17]} The service manages various types of email including shipping notifications, friend requests, sign-up confirmations, and email newsletters. It also handles internet service provider (ISP) monitoring, domain keys, sender policy framework (SPF), and feedback loops.^{[11][18][19][20]} Additionally, the company provides link tracking, open rate reporting, and CAN-SPAM compliance.^[18] It also allows companies to track email opens, unsubscribes, bounces, and spam reports without the utilization of code.^[5][18][21] Beginning in 2012, the company integrated SMS, voice, and push notification abilities to its service through a partnership with Twilio.^[13]

SendGrid offers a freemium version and a Lite Plan (pay-as-you-go), as well as four expanded levels of service: Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum.^[5][22][23]

SendGrid’s clients include Pinterest, Twilio, Foursquare, Pandora, and Airbnb.^{[11][17][20][24]}

Controversy

In 2013, the company fired Adria Richards after she tweeted a picture of two developers who made jokes that offended her during a conference. Her firing initiated a Change.org petition and caused international press coverage.^[25]

Funding

After founding SendGrid in Riverside, CA in July 2009, Saldana, Lopez, and Jenkins enrolled the startup in the TechStars accelerator program and moved the company to Boulder, CO.^{[7][9][26][27][28]} By December 2009, the company announced it had raised $750,000 in a funding round led by Highway 12 Ventures.^[18] Other participating investors included SoftTech VC, FF Angel, and TechStars founder David Cohen.^[18]

In April 2010, the email software-as-a-service (SaaS) company received $5 million in Series A round funding from Foundry Group, SoftTech VC, and Highway 12 Ventures, as well as individual investors including David Cohen, Scott Petry, Dave McClure, and Matt Mullenweg.^[21][29] Ryan McIntyre, the co-founder of Foundry, joined SendGrid’s board of directors at this time as well.^[21]

In January 2012, SendGrid raised $21 million in Series B funding.^{[10][13][24][30][31][32][33]} The funding round – led by Bessemer Venture Partners and previous investors Highway 12 Ventures, Foundry Group, 500 Startups, and TechStars – occurred concurrently with a new partnership between SendGrid and Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform.^{[8][13][20][24][33]}

Growth and development

Former Oracle executive Jim Franklin joined SendGrid as the CEO in March 2011.^[1][34]

The company announced in May 2011 that it had sent out over 9 billion emails for more than 23,000 companies since its founding.^[23] In the same month, SendGrid announced a partnership with web host service Rackspace Hosting that allows Rackspace users to launch email campaigns using SendGrid’s software.^[5][20][22]

By January 2012, the service reported that it was sending out 2.6 billion personalized emails per month.^[10][30][32] By March, the company was experiencing 10% monthly growth.^[20]

SendGrid announced in June 2012 that it was working with 60,000 businesses and had sent out a total of 45 billion emails since its start in 2009.^[10]

On July 25, 2012, the company reported it had partnered with Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) companies CloudBees, Heroku, and Engine Yard.^[13] The company opened its Denver office the following October.^[7][12][15]

In December 2012, SendGrid teamed up with Twilio to incorporate SMS and push notification services to its platform.^[13][35] The company announced integrations with Parse, Windows Azure, and StackMob the same month.^[36] In April 2013, SendGrid announced it had sent over 100 billion emails.^[37] That June, the company released its new email marketing service.^[38][39][40] The service allows marketing professionals and non-technical users to create emails using various newsletter templates and features a drag-and-drop template to fill in content.^[39][40]

Awards and recognition

AlwaysOn announced its OnDemand Ones to Watch 2011 in March 2011, and featured SendGrid among the 16-company list.^[27]

In June 2012, SendGrid was a winner in the Red Herring Top 100 North America and made the Colorado Companies to Watch 2012 list.^[41][42] CEO Jim Franklin won the Colorado Technology Association’s Technology Community Connector of the year award in October 2012.^[43] The company made The Denver Post’s Top 10 Places to Work, Small Employers list in 2013.^[44]

References

External links

• Official Company Website