Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

In a partnership that makes so much sense it’s crazy, cloud-focused messaging startups SendGrid and Twilio have teamed up to empower SendGrid enterprise customers with a suite of messaging tools, including transactional emails, SMS, voicemails, and push notifications.

The two companies are already friendly, as I saw first-hand on the “startup bus” that SendGrid and Twilio co-sponsored this past July. Both companies have a passion for developers and robust APIs, as well as providing companies with powerful messaging solutions. Now they are taking their friendship a new level.

Ideally, the new service from SendGrid and Twilio will reduce the cost of building and maintaining a messaging infrastructure for major customers. SendGrid already takes care of transactional and marketing emails that companies need to send out, and it sent out more than 6 billion emails in October. Twilio steps in a provides the back-end solutions for managing texts, voicemails, and other telephony needs.

“We are thrilled to partner with the leading communications API platform provider. Twilio is powering the future of business communications solutions for the enterprise market,” Jim Franklin, CEO of SendGrid, said in a statement. “This multi-messaging platform reinforces our belief in the importance of providing an integrated cloud solution for the enterprise that is cost effective and simple to deploy.”

Boulder, Colo.- and Anaheim, Calif.-based SendGrid has received about $27 million in funding to date. Investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, Foundry Group, Highway 12 Ventures, SoftTechVC, 500 Startups, and Bullet Time Ventures.

San Francisco-based Twilio has raised about $33 million. Its investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, Union Square Ventures, Founders Fund, and 500 Startups.

Photo illustration: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Cloud email management startup Mimecast — the leading supplier of email management solutions for Microsoft Exchange and Office 365 — has raised $62.15 million in its third round of funding, the company announced today.

Mimecast has attracted more than 6,000 customers worldwide by helping companies better manage email with help from the cloud. It makes Exchange and Office 365 a more unified solution and makes sure emails are always available, secure, and compliant. It claims to have more than 50 percent year-over-year revenue growth in six of the last nine years.

“Today’s businesses are as dependent on email as ever but, increasingly, email struggles to keep up as the way we create, store, and share information changes,” Mimecast CEO and co-founder Peter Bauer said in a statement. “At Mimecast, we believe email needs to be rewired if it is to continue to deliver real value to businesses. Building on our history of innovation, we are working to make email more collaborative and more interactive to realize the true value of the vast amount of unstructured data in email stores.”

The new round of funding was led by Insight Venture Partners with participation from existing investor Dawn Capital. Including the new round, Mimecast has raised $83 million.

“Email is the most important means of business communication and, better than anyone else, Mimecast delivers a true integrated solution for secure and accessible email,” Jeff Lieberman, Managing Director at Insight Venture Partners, said in a statement.

United Kingdom-based Mimecast was founded in 2003. It has offices in Europe, North America, Africa, and the Channel Islands.

Money in clouds photo via Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Email-management startup SendGrid has partnered with leading Platform-as-a-Service providers including Heroku, Engine Yard, and CloudBees, the company announced today.

SendGrid helps more than 60,000 web application companies and developers send all kinds of emails to their customers, including shipping notifications, sign-up confirmations, and even notes to let you know you’ve earned a new “badge” on Foursquare. SendGrid customers include Pinterest, Airbnb, Twilio, Spotify, and Pandora.

Now SendGrid has added more integration partners so even more folks can use and get exposure to the service. People who use cloud development platforms Heroku, Engine Yard, Cloudbees, Standing Cloud, and AppHarbor will now have more incentive to use SendGrid as their email manager of choice. Prior to this, SendGrid had partnered with cloud infrastructure services Rackspace, SoftLayer, and HP Cloud Services. SendGrid’s cloud bases are clearly covered.

Boulder, Colo.- and Anaheim, Calif.-based SendGrid graduated from the TechStars program in 2009 and has received about $27 million in total funding. Investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, Foundry Group, Highway 12 Ventures, SoftTechVC, 500 Startups, and Bullet Time Ventures.

Check out the video explaining SendGrid below:

Etacts works as a plugin for Google’s Gmail and a web application. It scans email messages and determines which contacts are the most important. It then reminds users to keep in touch with those people and to respond to email messages from them. Users can set custom reminders for when Etacts should send notes to keep up the relationship — which can be once a week, month, quarter or year.

The announcement came after Etacts said it was discontinuing its service come February next year. That means that Salesforce is probably looking to integrate the Etacts tools directly into its CRM software suite.

Etacts also operates with phone records for users willing to share their calling history. The service can display all your recent email and phone conversations. The idea is to help both individual employees and executives manage the deluge of email messages they receive on a daily basis a little more efficiently, and to single out the most important relationships so those never dissolve.

Salesforce seems to have a lot of love for companies that have gone through Y Combinator. The CRM software developer also bought Heroku, which develops and deploys web-based applications that rely on the programming language Ruby on Rails, for $212 million. Given that the company specializes in providing some good tools to help manage business and customer relationships, the acquisition is a no-brainer.

Aside from having the Y Combinator pedigree, Etacts has raised money from some pretty high-level angel investors. The San Francisco, Calif.-based company launched in February this year and raised $700,000 in a seed funding round from the likes of Ron Conway, former Netscape CTO Eric Hahn and actor Ashton Kutcher.