Announcing Courier's $10M Series A

I'm excited to announce that Courier has raised a $10.1M Series A funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. This round also saw participation from Matrix Partners, Twilio, Slack, Y Combinator, and many great angel investors, including Acceleprise, Allen Gannett (Founder, TrackMaven), Andrew Miklas (Co-Founder, PagerDuty), Edith Harbaugh (Co-Founder, LaunchDarkly), Eric Koslow and Jack Altman (Founders, Lattice), Joe Payne (CEO, Code42; former CEO, Eloqua), Lachy Groom (early Stripe), Ott Kaukver (CTO, Twilio), SaaS Ventures, and others. This follows a previously unannounced $2.3M seed round that we raised last summer.

Our investors are world-class experts in messaging, communication infrastructure, and developer tools. I'm immensely grateful to them for the help they’ve provided every step of the way. This round of financing will help us grow the team so we can pursue our vision of making Courier the sensible default for every software product’s communication infrastructure.

We're just getting started

I founded Courier last year because I saw a big gap in most product teams' architectures, a gap that my own teams had built solutions to over and over again. While there are great low-level messaging tools like SendGrid and Twilio and mature marketing automation solutions (like Oracle’s Eloqua where I had previously helped lead engineering), I constantly saw development teams building communication infrastructure for non-marketing use cases, like transactional messaging and notifications, from scratch. Something was still missing.

Last spring, I decided to bridge this gap once and for all. While raising what I had then planned to be a friends and family pre-seed round, I met Patrick Malatack – Partner at Matrix Partners and former VP of Product at Twilio. Not only did Pat immediately get it, he had actually taken a stab at solving this problem after hearing many customers at Twilio struggle with the complexity of building and integrating communication infrastructure. He is the ideal investor for us and Matrix Partners ultimately led our $2.3M seed round.

Shortly after receiving the term sheet from Matrix Partners, we were accepted into Y Combinator’s Summer 2019 batch. That summer we grew to a team of four, built our MVP, and went live with our first production customers just before Demo Day. That was almost exactly a year ago. Today we count dozens of amazing cloud companies as customers, including LaunchDarkly, Long Term Stock Exchange (LTSE), Lattice, Expel, and Blissfully, we’ve grown to a team of 11, and we’re excited to announce this new funding round.

With our Series A, we’re partnering with another world-class investor – Byron Deeter at Bessemer Venture Partners – and leveraging strategic investments from the top companies in SMS, email, and workplace communication with Twilio, SendGrid, and Slack all joining the round.

What's next for Courier

We have big plans for Courier. We’re building what we believe will be the sensible default for every software product’s communication infrastructure. We’re investing in new features that will give you out-of-the-box solutions to common messaging challenges and that will scale with you from startup to IPO, including:

• Delayed and Scheduled Messages
• Message Batching (aka “Digests”)
• Message Fan-out
• UI Libraries for Notification Centers and In-App Notifications
• And a few things we aren’t quite ready to announce 😉

Join our team

If you're passionate about solving problems nearly every software team struggles with and want to shape the next generation of communication infrastructure, we want to hear from you!
Onwards! 🚀

Troy

Founder & CEO, Courier