Isaac Saldana is co-founder and president of SendGrid. The roots of the company were born of his frustration in getting emails delivered through apps he was building, he tells us. So he started a company with the snappy name SMTPAPI.com, which as one might expect, featured an SMTP API. He applied and was accepted to the Techstars program, which calls itself the “#1 startup accelerator in the world” and is based in Boulder, CO. Techstars receive mentorship and $118,000 in funding in exchange for a 7-10% share in their company.
After completing the Techstars program in July 2009, Isaac got seed funding for the re-named company SendGrid in November of that year and Series A funding in April 2010. He also met Jim Franklin through Techstars co-founder Brad Feld, and Franklin now serves as SendGrid’s CEO.
Once briefed on this history, we had a couple of other questions for him:
Cloud Computing Journal: So can you give us an idea of the scale of the services SendGrid provides today?
Isaac Saldana: Delivering wanted email to the inbox is increasingly complex for businesses who rely on it as a primary vehicle to grow and retain their customer base. SendGrid is the global leader in providing technology solutions that dramatically increase the deliverability of application-generated and customer engagement email.
SendGrid has built a trusted, globally-distributed cloud platform that successfully delivers over 13 billion emails each month. To date, the company has sent over 250 billion emails, representing 2% of global non-spam email traffic.
CCJ: And who is your customer base?
Isaac: SendGrid’s customer base includes best-of-breed Internet and mobile-based applications such as Pinterest, Airbnb, Pandora, Hubspot, Spotify, Uber, Linkedin and FourSquare as well as more traditional enterprises.
SendGrid’s customers also include a large community of developers who build cloud-based applications that leverage our platform. In total, SendGrid has had over 175,000 customers.
CCJ: How do you see email evolving in an era of mobile devices?
Isaac: According to data from the U.S. Consumer Device Preference Report from Movable Ink, 65 percent of email is now being accessed via mobile devices in the US.
As a result, email is becoming an important tool for customer engagement via mobile devices.
But, while email opens on mobile devices have gone up, the time spent reading emails has decreases and as such the content, frequency and messages in email must be customized and optimized for mobile. SendGrid has several recommendations has for optimizing an email campaign on a mobile device and has conducted its own recent study in the US and UK about which devices are being used to open email.