Send­Grid sends more than 435 mil­lion emails dai­ly, and is used by a third of Alexa’s top 10,000 Web sites that employ a trans­ac­tion­al email provider.

Com­ing from the Tech­Stars accel­er­a­tor in 2009, Besse­mer Ven­ture Part­ners, Foundry Group, and oth­ers has pro­vid­ed Send­Grid with 27.4 mil­lion in fund­ing. They are cur­rent­ly sport­ing 210 full-time employ­ees. In 2012 Send­Grid Labs was formed, cre­at­ing its first prod­uct – Loader.io, which allow devel­op­ers to test their cloud-based apps and APIs for load per­for­mance and scal­a­bil­i­ty. CEO Jim Franklin says more than 15,000 cus­tomers use it.

Franklin is also think­ing Send­Grid can be a plat­form which oth­ers can build “next gen” email apps. Hub­spot and Par­dot have already built on Send­grid, Franklin claims, as well as the fact that the com­pa­ny is “rapid­ly approach­ing” $50 mil­lion in annu­al rev­enues and to top that the C round fund­ing brings the total raised by the com­pa­ny to $48 million.

This new cash flow will be ded­i­cat­ed to make the plat­form big­ger, like build­ing new data-dri­ven prod­ucts, boost­ing mar­ket­ing efforts to add more cus­tomers, and invest­ing in ways to increase email deliv­er­abil­i­ty. “We’re real­ly the only com­pa­ny that has that kind of scale expe­ri­ence [in email],” says Franklin.

Ama­zon SES (Sim­ple Email Ser­vice) is Send­grid’s main com­peti­tor, but the big dif­fer­ence is that Send­Grid has 24/7 cus­tomer ser­vice sup­port and a self-serve mod­el that keeps costs low for adding cus­tomers beyond its cur­rent base of over 180,000.

The thing about Send­Grid is they have the abil­i­ty to noti­fy their clients if the mail was received.  Was it opened? Was it clicked on? They can seg­ment cus­tomers by engage­ment — and that’s some­thing Ama­zon isn’t all that great at pro­vid­ing. Send­Grid has sent out more than 200 bil­lion emails. It deliv­ers a half bil­lion new emails each day, so it won’t be long until it leaves McDonald’s total num­ber of burg­ers sold in the dust.

Car­ly Brantz the Send­Grid Direc­tor of Rev­enue Mar­ket­ing says that mobile can­not be ignored. 90% of peo­ple check their phones for emails and that the place to hit your poten­tial cus­tomers. She says you must send tar­get­ed mes­sages!  Craft your emails look­ing at the behav­ioral and demo­graph­ic infor­ma­tion that mat­ters to your busi­ness. Then, use the infor­ma­tion you have col­lect­ed on gen­der, loca­tion, pre­vi­ous buy­ing his­to­ry, etc., to tar­get your users in a unique and mean­ing­ful way.

She also believes there is absolute­ly no rea­son not to be con­stant­ly mon­i­tor­ing, test­ing, and tweak­ing the ele­ments of your email pro­gram to make informed deci­sions. If some­thing is work­ing with pos­i­tive results keep test­ing new ver­sions. Data will always sur­prise you, and get rid of your assump­tions. You should also be ana­lyz­ing your sub­scriber list. You real­ly don’t want to send con­tent to unin­ter­est­ed sub­scribers, you want to keep your rep up with rel­e­vant e‑mails. Send opt-in or opt-out mes­sages to fil­ter your email lists.

In addi­tion, dur­ing the hol­i­days, send reg­u­lar­ly to “extra-engaged” users. Brantz says “your most ded­i­cat­ed cus­tomers will tol­er­ate more email com­ing from you and will appre­ci­ate spe­cial offers cre­at­ed just for them”.

If you would like to work for Send­grid check out this Send­grid Account Exec­u­tive role.