Email creation startup Stensul announces $16M funding

Stensul, a start-up company that aims to simplify the process of building marketing emails, has raised $16 million in Series B funding.

When the company raised $7 million in Series A funding two years ago, founder and CEO Noah Dinkin announced how it stood out from his previous startup, FanBridge. He said that although there are many products that focus on email delivery, Stensul focuses on the email creation process.

Dinkin says that for many teams, creating marketing emails can take weeks. With Stensul, the process can be reduced to only two hours, and marketers can create emails on their own without having to ask developers for help. Things like brand guidelines are already built in, and it’s easy to get feedback and approval from executives and other teams.

Dinkin also pointed out that although large marketing clouds include “some kind of email builder, it is not their focus.”

The team has recently grown to more than 100 employees, and new customers include Capital One, ASICS Digital, Greenhouse, Samsung, AppDynamics, Kroger and Clover Health. New features include integration with Workfront, a work management platform.

In addition, with the suspension or reduction of other marketing channels during the pandemic, Dinkin said that email has only become more important, while the old, time-consuming process has become more and more burdensome.

“We need more emails — whether that’s more versions or more segments or more languages, the requests are through the roof,” he said. “The teams are the same size … and so that’s where especially the leaders of these organizations have looked inward a lot more. The ways that they have been doing it for years or decades just doesn’t work anymore and prevents them from being competitive in the marketplace.” said Dinkin

The new round of financing was led by USVP, Capital One Ventures, Peak State Ventures, and existing investors Javelin Venture Partners, Uncork Capital, First Round Capital and Lowercase Capital participated in the financing. Individual investors include Okta co-founder and chief operating officer Frederic Kerrest, Okta CMO Ryan Carlson, former Marketo/Adobe executives Aaron Bird, Avid Larizadeh Duggan, Gary Swart and Talend CMO Lauren Vaccarello.

Dinkin said the funding will enable Stensul to expand its marketing, product, engineering and sales teams.