Sendoso’s Journey to Category Domination and $100M Series C Funding with SoftBank
By: Pascale Diaine
Tags: Vc Funding, B2b Marketing, Sales, B2b Sales, CRM

We’re thrilled to share the news that Sendoso has secured $100 million in Series C funding — led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with great plans to continue growth and expand internationally with the launch of its European office in Ireland.

Storm Ventures’ involvement with Sendoso has come a long way, and we are psyched by the announcement. Today we wanted to reflect on the story so far.

Casual intro to a Seed Round

I first met Sendoso’s CEO in October 2017 at the Dreamforce event. Tiago Paiva, a long-time friend, and CEO of Talkdesk (Storm portfolio), casually introduced me to one of his former account executives, Kris RudeeGraap, who had recently left Talkdesk to start his own venture, a B2B gifting platform.

Little did I know at the time that this random introduction would culminate in a seed round led by Storm Ventures — and the emergence of a groundbreaking new business. Storm invested in early 2018, followed by a Series A in 2019 and a B round in 2020.

With Sendoso’s co-founders Kris and Braydan back in February 2018 when we first invested.

Magic Layer

What struck us about Sendoso was its promise as a ‘magic layer’ between Salesforce and a fulfillment center, helping businesses delight prospects with thoughtful attention. We were impressed by clever features enabling the user to store or select personalized gifts, removing hassles around storage, shipping, or packaging. Not to mention the Outreach, Salesloft, and Salesforce integrations at the time. All the finer elements were taken care of — convenient in a world where portfolio companies are struggling to entice prospects to demos and webinars, let alone to physically attend a scheduled meeting. Happy customers would call Sendoso their ‘meeting maker’ and reported an increase of over ten times in leads showing up to a meeting after using the platform, as well as boosting their actual sales pipeline conversion rates.

Built by sales professionals for sale professionals

Kris and his co-founder Braydan Young, another ex-account executive, decided to tackle the growing problem of digital fatigue. They were on a mission — to enable businesses to stand out from the crowd, rising above the noise in a world where every prospect is bombarded with cold calls and emails. ‘Physical send’ is a tough and complicated process to scale, but the duo were determined to crack this puzzle for the first time. They would give the world of B2B corporate gifting, direct mail, and CRM — a new lease of life. When we first met up with the team at Sendoso, the team consisted of roughly 20 employees in a small office in SoMa, San Francisco — office one of their angel investors let them share with its own business. The company has since exploded to over 500 employees, and 20,000 users.

Keeping the Lead

It has been fascinating to witness the growth of this phenomenal team. When Michelle Palleschi joined the founders, she became the powerhouse the team needed to accelerate the potential of the business: setting up the fulfillment center, fine-tuning day-to-day operational aspects of the company, and paving the way for hyper-growth. Sendoso’s distributed team is now tapping the European market and serving international accounts. They expect to grow their staff by 30% this year. Most entrepreneurs are well aware that building a new category and leading it is tough. However, building it and keeping the lead is even more of a challenge. Today, Sendoso is the clear leader of the Sending Platform category they created. The company has forever transformed the way that S&M, Customer Success, and HR teams work.

At Storm, we are grateful for being a part of Sendoso’s runaway success and we can’t wait to see the new heights the business will reach with this new round of funding. Congrats team Sendoso!!