Mailjet (eF11) acquired by Mailgun
Mailjet, the transactional and marketing emailing platform, has been acquired by Mailgun. Launched in 2011, Mailjet was eFounders’ first company to launch. They had grown to 150 employees, became profitable, and raised $17M in funding from Alven, Iris, and Seventure. Their acquisition by a Thoma Bravo backed player marks a new chapter in Mailjet’s 8 year adventure. And a symbolic milestone for eFounders: Mailjet being our first company we helped launch and a major part of our story as a startup studio.
Mailjet’s story
Mailjet started in 2011 as the first European player to deliver transactional emailing. We were building our first companies and we needed a service like Mailjet to send emails and track engagement. We partnered with Julien and Wilfried — the two tech founders — and helped launch and scale our first SaaS.
And the company grew at an amazing pace from there. Initially designed to serve the developer community, the service evolved progressively with more features to give SMBs the same tools as larger enterprises at an affordable cost, all delivered in self-service. The platform finally grew into a natural hub for all things email marketing and transactional SMS services.
With the arrival of Alexis Renard, serving as CEO, I left my operational role in the company, remaining active on the board. Alexis did a great job going ‘upmarket’ by developing services and features serving more sophisticated clients. Today the company is a well recognized player for products like Passport helping marketing and engineering teams build responsive emails collaboratively.
The team grew to 150 Mailjetters spread across 9 cities. The company had grown to become the European leader for all things emailing, with compliance and ease of use at the core of the product.
A local player with world-wide reach
We’ve known Mailgun for a very long time. Their reputation is sterling: with a strong service level for everything related to transactional emails, targeting primarily the developer community, the company grew a very solid user base and is one of the two leading actors in the US.
By joining forces, Mailgun and Mailjet aim to become the most-used emailing solution in the world. Both companies are highly complementary on the product side, as well as in terms of their geographical reach. Present on 3 continents and able to support English, French, Spanish, and German-speaking customers, the team is looking to take on a leading role on the market. Combined, Mailjet and Mailgun will serve nearly 300,000 customers, an incredible number.
The first company launched by our studio
Mailjet’s story started in a first tiny office in Paris. And it started before eFounders was even launched. I served as a CEO for a couple of years, raising a Series A before making way for new leadership. Mailjet continued to grow fast. And, a lot is owed to Julien and Wilfried for years of tireless work making sure the company was set on the right track as well as to the current CEO Alexis, who transformed our initial efforts into a robust, well-run company.
As a studio, Mailjet was our petri dish. We learned A LOT about how to run a SaaS company, as well as where we were able to bring value as a venture launcher. We were for the first years very close with the team, even sharing a larger office space in rue du Sentier just around the time Mention, Front, and Aircall were coming out of the ground.
Thibaud and Didier, my two oldest partners in eFounders, join me on congratulating the whole Mailjet team: thanks, it’s been a great journey!
