SendGrid offers a powerful and flexible cloud-based transactional email platform that enables companies and application developers to easily send and receive emails to and from their users, while enhancing their email delivery rates and providing rich analytics. The SendGrid platform easily scales to handle millions of users, providing access to world-class email infrastructure services, freeing developers from the hassles of managing the complexities of email servers and technologies.
Historically, companies have sent two categories of email to their customers and/or users: bulk emails, which are typically marketing messages sent out to their entire user base, and transactional emails, which are user-specific emails that update a particular user about changes activity in his/her account, provide purchase confirmations, send password reset notifications, etc. There exists a large and mature ecosystem devoted to outsourcing and optimizing the sending of mass- marketing emails to end-users. These emails are often regarded as spam by their recipients, despite the fact that most users likely opted-in to receive such emails when they registered for an account with the website sending these messages.
Interestingly, no such ecosystem has developed around transactional emails, despite (or perhaps because of) the greater challenges and message volumes associated with supporting an effective transactional email system in-house. As an example, it is estimated that Facebook alone sends well over one billion transactional emails to its users per day. Unlike mass-marketing bulk emails, transactional emails are seldom perceived as spam by end-users, and both the sender and the receiver have a vested interest in these transactional emails arriving at their destination.
Managing a transactional email system in-house results in increased costs associated with supporting the email system, while poor deliverability rates of an application’s transactional emails can decrease user engagement, site traffic and revenue.
Most web application developers are not proficient with mail server technology or the SMTP protocol that underlies it – the expertise required to deeply understand the email technology stack is very different from the HTTP/XML/HTML expertise that the average web developer possesses.
SendGrid moves transactional email functionality to the cloud and allows web developers to access sophisticated email processing capabilities through a simple API (application programming interface) that frees the developer from having to deploy, scale or manage an email server. SendGrid’s cloud-based email services enhance transactional email deliverability and scalability, while also providing rich analytics and enhanced email capabilities without requiring the developer to write custom email-specific code.
Integration with SendGrid is simple for the developer, requiring only a change of DNS settings to redirect outbound and/or inbound email through SendGrid’s servers. SendGrid provides a free entry-level demo account that allows a developer to send up to 200 emails daily free of charge. When customers move above the 200 emails/day limit, they are required to upgrade to a paid account, with monthly charges based on volume.
SendGrid was a graduate of the Boulder TechStars Class of 2009, and Foundry Group partner Ryan McIntyre acted as a mentor for SendGrid’s CEO and co-founder Isaac Saldana throughout the summer program. Following SendGrid’s “graduation” from TechStars, the company raised a $750k seed round in late 2009. Since their launch in the Fall of 2009, SendGrid has landed thousands of customers and has delivered nearly 1.2 billion messages on their behalf.
As we observed SendGrid’s rapid customer growth, which has occurred through word of mouth and without formal sales or marketing efforts, we made an offer to invest in SendGrid, and, thankfully, they accepted our offer to lead this round. We’ve got a long history of investing in the email ecosystem, most recently via our investments in Postini (acquired by Google in 2007) and Return Path. SendGrid is in many ways architecturally analogous to Postini (and shares Postini’s simple DNS-based deployment model), but instead of serving as an inbound email filter to enterprise email inboxes, SendGrid provides its cloud-based email infrastructure in the service of application generated emails sent to (and received from) users of a web-based application.
SendGrid sits squarely in the middle of our Protocol investment theme, which subsumed our Email, RSS and Implicit Web themes. We are excited to welcome the company to the Foundry Group portfolio and look forward to working with SendGrid’s founders Isaac Saldana, Jose Lopez, Tim Jenkins and the rest of the SendGrid team to build the company into a huge player in the email infrastructure market.
Foundry Group Moves to Twitter Platform for Deal Evaluation
While we are fans of investing in companies in the email ecosystem with our thematic investing approach, we have come to the realization that email is not the most efficient form of communication for evaluating potential investment opportunities.
We are blessed to have a large number of entrepreneurs who are interested in us as potential partners and the volume of email we receive can sometimes overwhelm us, so we began the investigation for a more streamlined approach. We hired consultants from McKinsey & Company last summer and after 9 months of working with us to learn how we operate, it was obvious that Twitter was the right choice.
The benefits of Twitter versus other platforms were clear. First, everyone is on Twitter, so there is no chance that an entrepreneur wouldn’t be able to reach us. Second, this will greatly reduce the number of spreadsheets and financial projections that we would feel obligated to read. We realize that financial projects are just that – projections and therefore are never accurate. We’ve decided to stop pretending that they make sense. Third, and perhaps most importantly, if an entrepreneur cannot explain their opportunity in 140 characters or less, how focused can they be?
Besides, with the amount of board meetings that we attend, verbosity is not a wanted characteristic.
Speaking of board meetings, we have begun the process of streamlining board meetings with McKinsey, as well. We’re hoping to devise a similar approach using Skype to eliminate the need for face-to-face meetings and travel.
So, if you are an entrepreneur and want to work with us, Tweet us! One thing to note: PLEASE do not send us twitter links or multiple tweets per company. This is just as bad as email and really destroys the spirit of what we are trying to do here.
We look forward to hearing from you:
@bfeld @ryan_mcintyre
@jasonmendelson @sether
Introducing: Trada
Today is the public launch of Trada – a company we’ve been working with for the last 18 months to develop a platform that we believe will revolutionize search marketing. The fundamental premise is pretty straightforward: search campaigns are better managed by experts. The Trada platform brings together a “crowd” of search marketing experts to work on search campaigns of Trada advertisers across multiple search engines (currently Google, Yahoo and Bing). These experts propose ad copy, manage ad groups and keywords and deliver clicks (and conversions) to Trada advertisers for an advertiser determined price. Because the company leverages a group of experts, campaigns in the Trada system have more keywords (6,200 on average), a larger number of people working them (the system average is 24 optimizers per campaign) and as a result better success (the company’s customers see reductions in cost per conversion in some cases of over 25% even while increasing their search spending).
You can read more about the business at www.trada.com, on Seth’s post about the launch here and in this morning’s TechCrunch piece here. Trada founder Niel Robertson also has a great post about the genesis of the company up on the Trada blog.
“Organic Motion is a global leader in the development of breakthrough markerless motion capture and analysis technologies. Our software products utilize state-of-the-art computer vision techniques and high performance graphics hardware to deliver an industry first set of production, entertainment, and research tools for use in a variety of industries.
We are seeking to expand our Manhattan, NY based engineering team with applicants who have a solid mastery of practical C/C++ development skills combined with strong analytical and problem solving skills in a variety of areas including computer vision, computer graphics, networking, pipelining and optimization, biomechanics, and more.
We are looking for candidates having 2 or more years experience in a professional development setting in addition to a PHD, Master’s degree, or an exceptional Bachelor’s.
* Game development
* Distributed systems
* Motion capture creation / analysis
* Physics
* Scripting languages (Python, Lua, Bash, Perl, etc)
* UNIX, Linux
* Mathematical modeling, filtering, signal processing
* Biokinematics
* GUI development (MFC, Qt, WxWidgets)
* Autodesk 3d animation suite API
Responsibilities include:
* Optimization (single-core / multi-core / multi-process)
* Algorithm development (raw 3D data analysis)
* Application development (server and client side)
* Code maintenance and troubleshooting
* Supporting conferences and shows (past shows: SIGGRAPH, GDC, CES, I/ITSEC)
This is an exciting opportunity to join a dynamic team with potential for rapid growth and access to a great deal of compelling technological resources. We are looking for individuals with fresh ideas and the skills to put those ideas to the test. This is a unique opportunity to have a major impact on a growing company!
If you are an excellent candidate, then please reply with your resume in Word or PDF format to careers@organicmotion.com. A code sample would also be a big plus!”
Memeo Connect is a cross-platform application that allows Google Apps Premier customers to access, migrate and synchronize files between their desktop and Google Docs. Simply put, Memeo Connect allows users to have local copies of all the files and folders in their Google Docs collection synced in real time to any number of their computers (Mac or Windows).
This provides two huge benefits to users: first, it enables users to access and edit their docs while offline, and, second, it allows batch upload and conversion of Microsoft Office documents (and other formats) to Google Docs. If you’re interested in learning more, PC World provides a good analysis of Memeo’s and Google’s announcements, while Memeo has provided a nice screen-cast demo of Memeo Connect on YouTube:
We’re very excited that Memeo and Google have teamed up to offer this strategically important functionality to Google Apps Premier Edition customers. Memeo Connect helps resolve some of the biggest hurdles potential Google Apps customers have when contemplating moving from Microsoft Office to Google Apps: namely offline access and the ability to migrate legacy document collections to the cloud.
Memeo Connect helps bridge the divide between the cloud and the desktop and addresses the simple reality that Google Docs and Microsoft Office documents are going to co-exist in real-world environments for the foreseeable future – even if an enterprise commits completely to Google Apps for its office productivity suite, MSFT Office docs will still find their way in to their environment via partners, vendors and customers.
When we invested in Memeo in 2007, we saw the potential of Memeo’s technology platform to provide consumers and business users with sophisticated, real-time, content-aware backup, sync and media sharing tools, functionality which falls squarely into our Digital Life investment theme. Since our investment, Memeo has released and iterated on an entire suite of award-winning products which include Memeo Instant Backup, Memeo AutoSync, Memeo Share, Memeo Send and, now, Memeo Connect for Google Apps. To date, Memeo has distributed over 45 million licenses for their software to users in 150 countries and 35,000 companies, 144 of which are in the Fortune 1000. With the addition of Memeo Connect for Google Apps to their product line, we see the potential for Memeo to reach millions more users. Congrats, Memeo!
