E-mail infrastructure startup SendGrid has raised $21 million in its second round of funding and created a partnership with Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform to convince more enterprises to use its e-mail delivery solutions, the company announced today.
SendGrid helps more than 37,000 clients with sending all kinds of e-mails to their customers, including shipping notifications, confirmations and even notes to let you know you’ve been ousted as the “mayor” of a location on Foursquare. On top of doing the heavy lifting when it comes to sending e-mails to large numbers of customers, the company provides real-time analytics about how effective those e-mail campaigns are.
“E-mail is not a fun thing to deal with,” SendGrid CEO Jim Franklin told VentureBeat. “We alleviate the pain of dealing with e-mail.”
The new funding round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with existing investors Foundry Group, Highway 12 Ventures, SoftTechVC, 500 Startups and Bullet Time Ventures also participating. Franklin highlighted that every prior investor invested in this round as well, indicating that the company was on solid financial footing and would continue to grow quickly.
SendGrid already works with Heroku and Rackspace’s platforms, but now it will also support Microsoft’s Windows Azure development platform. Moving to partner with Azure will help the company get more exposure, especially with enterprises. SendGrid’s traction has mostly been with smaller companies and tech startups like Spotify, Foursquare, Pinterest, Airbnb and Twilio. But with Azure support, the company hopes more large companies will jump on board.
“Almost every venture-backed tech company you can think of is working with us … but Azure is not big with the emerging tech crowd,” Franklin said. “But with Microsoft at its center, Azure could attract several big companies to the fold.”
Boulder, Colo.-based SendGrid graduated from the TechStars program in 2009 and has received about $27 million in total funding, including this new round.
SendGrid sends more than 2.6 billion e-mails per month for customers in more than 150 countries. Depending on the plan, the company will handle the sending of between 5,000 and 25,000 e-mails a month for free. Once your company moves past that point or grows to need more e-mails, the company starts charging. $79 a month, for example, will get you approximately 100,000 e-mails sent a month.
You can see a cool infographic on SendGrid’s funding history and products below:
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