Postal.io Emerges From Stealth With $9M Series A

Postal.io came out of stealth mode Tuesday with a $9 million Series A round to launch its direct mail platform for sales and marketing teams.

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This is the San Luis Obispo, California-based company’s first investment, which was led by Mayfield.

Rajeev Batra, partner at Mayfield, is now on Postal.io’s board. (Editor’s note: Batra is also an investor in Crunchbase.)

Postal.io helps scale direct mail workflows for sales and marketing, empowering companies to cut through online marketing clutter while improving offline conversion rates with automated direct mail, corporate gifting and charitable giving.

“The benefit of making sales and marketing digital is to operate with empathy for users, and Erik and Jed are taking this a step further,” Batra told Crunchbase News referring to company co-founders Erik Kostelnik and Jed Danner.

Said Batra: “They are bringing the benefit of digital to the offline side, which had not been done on the business-to-business side, and making it scalable and deeply personal. They are closing the empathy loop.”

Although this is the company’s first investment, this is not the first company for the co-founders. This is actually Kostelnik’s fourth startup. Previously, he and Danner founded TextRecruit, which connected job seekers with employers. They exited the company nearly two years ago, Kostelnik said.

Kostelnik said he then moved to San Luis Obispo to start the company, which has enabled Postal.io to save 50 percent on costs and recruit top talent.

He told Crunchbase News that since most people are working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for solutions like Postal.io is particularly urgent, because email marketing shows a continued diminishing rate of return. According to industry experts, post-pandemic email marketing volume is up, while response rates remain at near or all-time lows, he said.

“We hope to build a $1 billion business here,” he said. “Our vision is to establish a new revenue source for local vendors to create a physical connection because they don’t have the foot traffic right now.”

Illustration: Dom Guzman