Mailjet raises $11M Series B, primed to grow in a crowded email marketing space

Mailjet, one of many email providers in an increasingly complex email landscape, is announcing an $11 million Series B funding round today, bringing its total to $17.5 million from Iris Capital, Alven Capital, and new investor, Seventure. The company is using the funds to expand globally and continue adding to their suite of tools for better personalized emails.

“Where once there was a clear separation between marketing and transactional email, it’s much more grey today,” Mailjet CEO Alexis Renard told me in an email interview. It’s in part because the infrastructure for sending transactional email (e.g., a confirmation email after making a purchase) is vastly different than for a marketing message, whether it’s personalized or a generic newsletter. By effectively serving email use cases for both marketing and transactional emails, the company has tripled its headcount since 2014, with offices in Paris, New York, Berlin, London, and Sofia — rapidly becoming a leading player in the European marketplace.

With over 32,000 active customers in 150 countries, Mailjet continues to expand based on the premise of producing more ‘marketer-ready’ tools driven by data and personalization on a cloud infrastructure.

“The email industry is always evolving,” Renard said. “New devices, email clients, and recipient behavior play into how companies must adapt their email strategy to stand out. In the past few years, we’ve seen a trend towards companies of all sizes improving their email design and chipping away at the email ‘blast’ mentality by incorporating deeper personalization from multiple data sources.”

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Mailjet has responded to these user behavior and environmental changes by building tools marketers and data analysts can more easily use together, such as a drag and drop campaign creator launched this summer.

“By combining both developer-friendly APIs and user-friendly campaign and design tools into one platform, we essentially replace two or more tools, so our customers can have all of their email data in one place. We’re moving further and further away from the email as newsletters and towards email as customer experience.”

Mailjet was featured in VB Insight’s comprehensive buyer’s guide on email marketing tools as a “Best Bet,” with a sweet spot for SMB’s and mid-sized companies.