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Nylas Closes $25M Series B To Drive Global Expansion Of Communication Platform

Illustration of conversation bubbles.

Retailers are constantly in search of new and meaningful ways to connect and engage with customers, and Nylas aims to innovate the way they do that.

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The San Francisco-based company helps developers build features that connect to any email, calendar and contacts provider, turning that data into a knowledge tree of who knows who, whom customers have spoken with and, based on their need, whom they should speak with next.

Rather than using a system that sends out customer emails from a proxy server, where they often get caught in spam filters, emails from Nylas come directly from the mailbox of the user.

“Email is your identity token for accessing a suite of services, but it is a complex channel to integrate with,” Nylas co-founder and CEO Gleb Polyakov told Crunchbase News. “We are able to do it one-to-one communication, at scale, as well as save customers 16 to 18 months of integration and $2 million in upfront development costs.”

Nylas, founded in 2014, secured a $25 million Series B round of funding, led by 8VC and Round13 Capital with participation from existing investors Spark Capital, ScaleUP and Slack Fund, as well as a new investor, Citi Ventures. Including this new funding, the company has raised a total of $55 million, according to Crunchbase data.

The funding follows the March acquisition of June.ai, a developer of artificial intelligence powered productivity tools that perform autonomous tasks across users’ inboxes, such as organizing messages, surfacing attachments, automating responses, and highlighting important interactions.

Two years ago, the company raised a $16 million Series A, which was used to develop its application programming interface platform, Polyakov said. The Series B will be used to continue building out the intelligence part of the product line and go-to-market strategy, as well as scale on security, sales and marketing, he added.

Nylas has increased its employees from 50 to 100, and Polyakov said he expects that trajectory to continue over the next year. In addition to the San Francisco headquarters, the company has offices in Denver and New York, and just opened a research and development site in Toronto.

Craig Strong, partner at Round13 Capital, said in a written statement that the company’s push to establish that R&D hub was a good opportunity to help Nylas reach the next stage of its global expansion.

“The amount of time Nylas is saving development teams is driving major efficiency gains for companies around the world,” Strong said. “Their ability to break down what can take a mid-sized development team years to build themselves into weeks or days is a game-changer.”

Nylas touts over 450 customers around the world, including Comcast, Hyundai and Realtor.com. More than 40,000 software developers around the world use the company to serve over 1.2 billion API calls and sync 15 terabytes of data daily, Polyakov said.

Company revenue and customer growth are doubling year over year, and he said he expects both to continue.

“Everyone is now operating as a tech company, even if they don’t realize it, so we want to help them to achieve cutting-edge communication to do so,” Polyakov said. “The value to the end user or the business doesn’t come from one channel, but through powerful customer engagement.”

Other customer engagement companies also recently received funding. Last week, Acquire closed a $6.4 million Series A to help sales and support agents see every customer encounter at one time. In May, Workvivo announced a $16 million Series A fundraise to turn lifeless all-company emails into engaging content for employees.

Illustration: Dom Guzman

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