Email creation startup Stensul announced Monday it closed on a $16 million Series B round led by USVP, with participation from new and existing investors including Capital One Ventures and Javelin Venture Partners.
The startup originally began as an agency making emails by hand for “one of the largest companies on the planet” — a process that would take days, founder and CEO Noah Dinkin wrote in a blog post.
Eventually, Stensul spun out and created a tool that makes the whole process of designing and distributing marketing emails more efficient for companies.
The platform’s drag-and-drop capabilities and custom modules and templates allow users to design emails quickly. Plus, Stensul has things like brand and design guidelines built in, so it’s easy to get quick approval from managers or other teams before materials go out. In the end, the company claims it can reduce the time it takes to create an email by 90 percent.
So far, Stensul has done well, landing major brands Box and Samsung as clients. However, Dinkin wrote that the hurdles introduced by the COVID-19 pandemic have made it clear that the work Stensul does is becoming even more important. With everyone at home and online more often, emails are an essential way for companies to connect with customers. Yet many still aren’t designing and distributing emails in an efficient way.
“It’s now late 2020, and most organizations will face major inefficiencies when it comes to everything that happens before their marketing automation platforms. The pandemic has only dialed up digital channels and stretched marketing teams to the edge,” Dinkin wrote. “Stensul Agile Email Creation is architected to directly address this need for collaboration, speed and agility in email marketing programs. In short, agility is the new velocity.”
Looking ahead, Stensul will use this fresh funding to further enhance its platform and scale its go-to-market functions. The company is also looking to grow its marketing, product, engineering and sales teams and has about a dozen open positions available at its New York City headquarters now.
