Photo courtesy of Sendlane.
Over the last several years, the Scripps Ranch email marketing firm has grown 100% year-over-year bringing in $7 million in annual recurring revenue. It expects to have 150 staffers by end of 2022.
San Diego-based Sendlane, an email marketing company for online businesses, has raised a $20 million Series A round after seeing strong growth for consecutive years.
This is the second institutional round for the 8-year-old startup. The financing round was led by Five Elms Capital. It has raised $23 million in total funding, to date.
The funding will be used to expand its national footprint, grow its headcount, and further develop its products and services for online businesses, said Jimmy Kim, co-founder and CEO of Sendlane.
Driving Customer Loyalty
A multichannel marketing automation platform, Sendlane essentially helps online convert shoppers into loyal customers.
Founded in 2013, Kim launched Sendlane as a solution for multiple companies he was running. He eventually shifted gears and focused on the idea full-time, and evolved Sendlane to become a global email platform serving thousands of online retail marketers and online brands through its email platform.
In particular, companies use Sendlane’s platform to convert more than 100 points of their customers’ data into engaging communications aimed at driving customer loyalty. It can increase revenue for customers between 20% and 40% on average, said Kim.
Helping 1,700 Companies
Sendlane operates in over 90 countries, and has scaled its team to 50 employees in San Diego. It has partnered with more than 1,700 e-commerce companies, with many of them being repeat customers.
The company is seeing over $7 million in annual recurring revenue, and is growing 100% year over year.
“We grew 100% last year,” said Kim. “Now we are looking to accelerate because of what happened in the last 18 months of COVID and hyper acceleration in e-commerce. What we anticipated to happen by 2025, we now believe will happen by 2023.”
Competitive Market
There are many players offering similar tools or platforms including ActiveCampaign and Klaviyo. Multi-billion dollar firms Salesforce, Hubspot and Constant Contact, are also big name players in email marketing.
However, Sendlane’s company’s differentiator is customer service, boasting short wait times and chats that answer questions in less than 15 seconds.
“We want to be the single source for customer journey data insights that provides flexibility for your business to grow,” said Kim. “We have a ton of new products coming out in the next year including two upcoming tools.”
Hiring Spree
Headquartered in Scripps Ranch, it employs roughly 50 staffers. Sendlane plans to add more tech jobs this year, specifically within product, engineering and marketing.
Kim expects to be at around 90 by the end of the year and 150 by the end of 2022. It currently has more than 20 open roles.
Looking forward, Sendlane is heads-down focused on listening to its customers’ needs and using that feedback to steer future product decisions and future roadmap.
“We’re hiring across the board, every role from every department is open at some level, including a lot of senior leadership,” said Kim. “Over the next 12 to 24 months, we will build an entire ecosystem around our existing products. Our goal is to become the market leader in this space.”
Sendlane
FOUNDED: 2013
CEO: Jimmy Kim
BUSINESS: Email marketing company.
HEADQUARTERS: Scripps Ranch
EMPLOYEES: 50
WEBSITE: www.sendlane.com
NOTABLE: CEO Jimmy Kim operated and exited three startups before starting Sendlane.
CONTACT: support@sendlane.com