Email signature management platform Exclaimer has raised £100 million ($133 million) in a round of funding led by Insight Partners.
Despite all the hullabaloo around modern enterprise communications tools such as Slack, soon to be a $27.7 billion Salesforce subsidiary, email still remains king for many, with a reported 80% of businesses still using it as their primary communication tool. That’s not to say that Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Zoom aren’t also used, but email’s asynchronicity makes it an attractive proposition and difficult to fully replace any time soon, particularly in external communications. And that, at least, is partly why Exclaimer has now managed to raise a hefty chunk of change from a venture capital and private equity firm that has backed a host of companies across the consumer and enterprise spheres, including Twitter, Shopify, Pipedrive, and Qualtrics.
Founded in the U.K. back in 2001, Exclaimer initially developed “bespoke software” before switching its focus to the email signature market. It initially developed an email signature service for Microsoft Exchange Server, designed to be deployed on premises, and in the intervening years it has expanded its scope to cover the cloud, including Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) and Google Workspace (formerly G Suite).
Exclaimer’s core selling point is that it allows businesses to centrally design and disseminate email signatures to everyone in the company, with consistent footers automatically inserted on all company emails across devices. The signatures can also be tailored and tweaked for specific teams and individuals, with admins able to control everything from a centralized dashboard.
Above: Exclaimer main dashboard
Through Exclaimer’s browser-based dashboard, Admins can select from pre-designed templates, or build their own from scratch using a drag-and-drop signature editor to include social media icons, promotional banners, legal compliance text, images, and more. Any changes that are made in the editor are instantly applied to each user in the company.
Above: Exclaimer signature designer
Prior to now, Exclaimer had raised £23 million ($30 million) in a single round of funding back in 2016, and with another $135 million in the bank, Exclaimer CEO Heath Davies told VentureBeat that it is well-financed to invest in its product and international growth as it “continues to thrive despite the challenges of the pandemic.”
Enterprising
A number of other players operate in this space, both legacy providers such as Symprex and newer entrants. Danish startup Templafy, which raised $25 million earlier this year, helps workers create company-compliant documents, and includes email signature management tools. Elsewhere, Sigstr, which turns email signatures into ads, was acquired by marketing technology platform Terminus last year, while France-based Boost My Mail raised a $1.2 million seed round a few months ago.
It’s clear that email remains a major focus in business communications, for startups and investors alike. That Exclaimer, a U.K.-based technology company that largely bootstrapped its way to profitability through its first 15 years, is now attracting one of the biggest investors from the U.S., is notable. While Fairview Equity Partners also invested in the round, Insight’s lead investment now makes it Exclaimer’s majority shareholder, replacing existing investor Livingbridge, which is now a minority shareholder.
Exclaimer already claims some 40,000 customers across 150 countries, including Sony, Cisco, Mattel, Unicef, NBC, and the BBC, with some of its customers holding licences for more than 300,000 users. The majority of these are cloud customers, paying a SaaS-based subscription to use the platform, while the remaining on-premise customers have bought a perpetual license with an annual maintenance and support contract.
In terms of pricing, Exclaimer charges on a sliding scale based on the number of users requiring an email signature — this can cost around $15 per month to cover 10 users, all the way up to $415 per month for 500 users.
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