Sendoso Raises $40M, and We’re Just Getting Started

As CEO and co-founder here at Sendoso, I’m both thrilled and humbled to share that we’ve announced $40M in Series B funding. This important milestone speaks to our impressive growth, provides validation for our category, and gives us the opportunity to continue building the leading Sending Platform.

When my co-founder Braydan and I launched the first iteration of Sendoso, we could have never imagined that in just a few short years we’d have more than 500 customers with 15,000 active users, over one million sends processed through our platform, recognition from analysts like Gartner, and multiple leadership positions on software review sites like G2.

I can’t help but think back to where we were before Sendoso and what ultimately made us decide to embark on this adventure.

The Rise of CaaS (Coffee as a Solution)

The first decade of my career was spent in sales, where I witnessed the evolution of outbound prospecting. Email became so popular that my prospects couldn’t keep up with all the cold outreach hitting their inboxes. Many of them also stopped answering their phones. So, I started sending coffee gift cards. Nothing fancy: just a $5 gift card that would land right on their desk with a handwritten note about wanting to buy them coffee.

My response rates skyrocketed. Prospects appreciated the effort I took to connect with them as people, instead of just a name on a list. This strategy worked well, but the manual effort involved did not. I spent late nights at the office (to the dismay of my wife) sourcing gift cards, stuffing envelopes, writing handwritten notes, getting to the post office, and so on. I also tried to scale this through our marketing department because I wanted the ability to send swag. They provided a spreadsheet to fill out so that they could send it on my behalf. But I just found myself constantly copying and pasting data from our CRM then waiting weeks until marketing had the time to execute. Eventually, I asked every sales and marketing person I knew if there was a way to automate sending gift cards and swag. There wasn’t.

The Birth of a Category

My co-founder Braydan had also been struggling to reach buyers, so he saw the value of sending something meaningful like a cup of coffee. The more people we talked to, the more we realized that teams everywhere were (A) struggling to connect with their potential customers and (B) unable to send any type of direct mail or corporate gifts at scale.

As we began to build a solution, we knew it needed to have specific components that didn’t exist in the tools we already had:

1. The ability to send anything, anywhere: handwritten notes, gift cards, postcards, wine, plants, sweet treats, personalized gifts, custom swag, catalogs, and more.
2. End-to-end fulfillment and inventory management: finding the right items, storing them, packing, shipping, and managing inventory all in a single interface.
3. Seamless integration with existing tools: options to send manually or via automated triggers from within the marketing, sales, and service software you already use.
4. Meaningful tracking and measurement: visibility into when items are received or redeemed, as well as overall campaign performance.
5. Scalability across multiple teams and budgets: something leverageable across an entire organization, from marketing to sales to customer teams, and even HR.
6. Data-driven personalization: more meaningful outreach based on recipient interests, intent, and interactions.

Thus, the Sending Platform category was born. What started as a solution to the pain we personally felt as salespeople has now transformed into a revolutionary strategy for engaging prospects, customers, and even employees. As the category leader, we have stayed committed to the core concept that started it all: Our buyers are human, so our sales and marketing outreach should be, too.

More Human Connections

This round of funding enables us to double down on our customers’ success by investing in platform R&D; hiring for our product, engineering, and warehouse operations teams; and expanding into new markets so we can enable companies across any industry to send at scale.

Oh! And in true Sendoso style, we’ve accompanied this incredible announcement with a video for your viewing pleasure.

We couldn’t be more excited for what the future has in store. But more importantly, we could not be more grateful to the people who have helped us get here: our customers, employees, partners, supporters, and community at large. You showed us that the Sending Platform was not only new, but needed.

Thank you for taking part in our mission to create more human connections in a digital world.