Email signature management platform Exclaimer has raised £100 million ($ 133 million) in a round of funding led by Insight Partners.
Despite the hullabaloo around modern enterprise communications tools like Slack, soon to be a $ 27.7 billion Salesforce subsidiary, a reported 80% of businesses still use email as their primary communication tool. That’s not to say companies aren’t also using Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Zoom, but email’s asynchronicity makes it difficult to fully replace anytime soon, particularly when it comes to external communications. This is one reason 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. in 2001, Exclaimer 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 has over the years 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 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 predesigned 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
Exclaimer raised £23 million ($ 30 million) in a single round of funding in 2016, and with another $ 133 million in the bank, CEO Heath Davies told VentureBeat the company 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, from legacy providers like Symprex to newer entrants. Danish startup Templafy, which raised $ 25 million earlier this year, helps workers create company-compliant documents and includes email signature management tools. 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.
Email clearly remains a major focus in business communications, for startups and investors alike. It is notable 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. While Fairview Equity Partners also invested in the round, Insight’s lead investment makes it Exclaimer’s majority shareholder, with existing investor Livingbridge now a minority shareholder.
Exclaimer already claims some 40,000 customers across 150 countries. These include Sony, Cisco, Mattel, Unicef, NBC, and the BBC, with some customers holding licenses 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 from around $ 15 per month to cover 10 users to $ 415 per month for 500 users.
