Early this summer, my partner George  and I walked into the bunker at TechStars in Boulder and met with Isaac Saldana, a young entrepreneur who, along with his small team of three, has been working feverishly on creating a solution to help companies get their important emails delivered. We were instantly impressed with Isaac and knew that he was onto something special.

SendGrid is an email service that solves the problems faced by companies sending transactional outbound email (emails delivered by software applications such as sign-up confirmations, shipping alerts, friend requests, and notifications). By using SendGrid instead of their current outbound email servers, companies can improve their delivery rates and solve scalability problems. SendGrid also solves many of the common problems faced by companies sending transactional email, such as CAN-SPAM compliance, link tracking, open rate reporting, and more. The company already has hundreds of paying customers and has delivered hundreds of  millions of emails on their behalf.

George and I during our first visit with Isaac and Tim (courtesy of Andrew Hyde)

For us, SendGrid represents the best of what great web-enabled software businesses offer: the ability for customers to outsource important and specific functions to experts at a significantly lower cost than they can do it themselves. Our belief is that SendGrid will be able to penetrate two market segments well and fairly quickly. The first segment is transactional messaging in general, where the combination of API/relay and advanced email enhancement modules, especially on an open platform, will resonate.  The second segment is the start-up segment:  smaller companies who are sophisticated about web and databases but not about email and messaging AND don’t want to pay much money for a solution.

We’re not the only ones who were impressed with Isaac and his team. Investing alongside us are some of the most successful seed investors in the country. Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC, Dave McClure of the Founders Fund and David Cohen of TechStars make up the rest of our investment syndicate, along with other notable angel investors. We’re thrilled to be a part of this exciting opportunity and look forward to working with this group of terrific entrepreneurs to create another great company here in the Rockies!

This entry was posted on Monday, December 7th, 2009 at 10:58 pm and is filed under Portfolio, Start-Up. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.