According to a 2017 Radicati Group report, an estimated 125 billion commercial emails are sent every day, and the number of email users is expected to grow from 3.7 billion in 2017 to 4.1 billion by 2021. Email delivery and performance platform SendGrid went public last week on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker SEND.
SendGrid’s Offerings
Denver, Colorado-based SendGrid was founded in 2009 by Isaac Saldana, Jose Lopez, and Tim Jenkins in 2009. It is a customer communication platform for sending transactional and marketing emails without the cost and complexity of maintaining email servers.
SendGrid manages the technical details of email delivery, like infrastructure scaling, ISP outreach, reputation monitoring, and real-time analytics. Its Email API service pricing plans start at $9.95 per month for up to 40,000 emails. It offers a Pro plan at $79.95 per month for up to 100,000 emails. For over 2.5 million emails, it offers Premier plans that have custom pricing.
Since its inception, the company has processed over a trillion emails. Its clients include Glassdoor, Spotify, Uber, Airbnb, LinkedIn, and FourSquare. As of September 30, 2017, it had over 58,000 customers globally, an increase of 36% year over year and employed 408 full-time employees.
Its competitors include companies that offer transactional email services, including Amazon, Mailgun, Oracle, and SparkPost as well as companies that offer email marketing services, including Adobe, Campaign Monitor, Endurance, IBM, MailChimp, Oracle, and Salesforce.
SendGrid’s Financials
As per the SEC filings, SendGrid generated revenue of $79.9 million in 2016, up 36% from $58.5 million in 2015 and from $42.7 million in 2014. For the first nine months of 2017, revenue was $80.1 million, up 41% y-o-y.
Net loss has steadily declined from $12.9 million in 2014 to $5.8 million in 2015 to $3.9 million in 2016. However, for the first nine months of 2017, net loss increased 36% y-o-y to $4.7 million. Its gross margin is 73% and it is profitable on an adjusted net income basis.