SendGrid, a Boulder-based startup and TechStars alumnus that develops e-mail delivery systems for a variety of web-based applications, raised $21 million in funding and inked a separate deal with Microsoft, company officials announced Tuesday.
The Series B round — which is more than triple the $5.75 million raised since SendGrid’s inception in 2009 — will allow for the company to expand its operations and its technology to accommodate for further rapid growth, said Robert Phillips, a company spokesman.
About 40,000 web applications such as those developed by HootSuite, Path and Boulder-based Standing Cloud use SendGrid’s technology. Last month, SendGrid’s customers sent more than 2.6 billion e-mails.
“That’s just a massive amount of e-mails to go through a system,” Phillips said.
In addition to using the financial boost to bulk up its development efforts and its systems and servers, SendGrid also will bring on more manpower. SendGrid, which employs 70 people at its offices in Boulder and Anaheim, Calif., should have more than 100 employees by next year, he said.
About 60 percent of the workforce is based in Boulder. Phillips expects that proportion to remain steady through the coming year.
Separately on Tuesday, the Boulder firm also announced that Microsoft Corp. would provide SendGrid’s services to customers of its Windows Azure cloud-based development offering. When new Azure users sign up for the service, the developers will receive 25,000 free e-mails per month, SendGrid said.
Financial terms of the Microsoft deal were not disclosed.
Being “deeply integrated” in Microsoft’s system could bode well for broader expansion down the road, Phillips said.
“As we move up the food chain … I think this will give us access to a lot of great enterprise (businesses),” he said.
The deal could help volley SendGrid to become “one of the largest e-mail platforms in the world,” he said.
That won’t come without competition. In addition to a number of upstarts in the sector, Amazon last year introduced its Simple Email Service, a bulk e-mail sending technology for developers and businesses.
The funding round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners and included participation from existing investors Foundry Group, Highway 12 Ventures, SoftTechVC, 500 Startups and Bullet Time Ventures.
“SendGrid’s transactional e-mail platform is emerging as a powerhouse in the platform-as-a-service space,” Byron Deeter, partner of Bessemer Venture Partners said in a statement. “SendGrid has solidified its category leadership position with a great platform and an outstanding team. We look forward to helping SendGrid grow and command even more market share in the future.”
Contact Camera Business Writer Alicia Wallace at 303-473-1332 or wallacea@dailycamera.com.