France-based Mailjet raises $3.3 million for its cloud-based emailing platform | Hacker News Reader

France-based Mailjet raises $3.3 million for its cloud-based emailing platform

thenextweb.com

I've been using them for the last 2/3 months and their platform is actually better than Sendgrid: Good deliverability in Europe, and most importantly the Web interface doesn't suck.

Great service!

since you have experience with Mailjet: Do they also offer an option the receive emails and parse them? Sendgrid seems to have an API for this.

I'm not sure, as I never needed to do that.

Last time I looked at Mailjet they didn't offer this. Sendgrid does do that, as does Mailgun. I've tried both of them for BunkerApp and decided on Mailgun for various reasions. One reason was that Mailgun offered a simple way for a catch-all-receive (* @*.bunkerapp.com) while with Sendgrid I had to jump through houps. Mailgun also offers a (for my needs) simpler parsing API.

If you need Inbound mails I'd definitely recommend looking at both Sendgrid and Mailgun (and Mailjet if they offer this now), then decide on what suits your particular needs more.

I asked a couple of weeks back and they did not, at least yet.

no email parsing. we use a free mailgun plan for that

I'm impressed about the amount. While my impression is that these days, a Silicon Valley startup can "easily" raise multiple millions over little more than a few launching customers, getting large investments in Europe has repeatedly been proven difficult. Is this a sign that things are changing? Or was my assumption wrong from the start?

I posted this here partly because I see fairly large amounts raised in Europe on a regular basis, but this seems to happen in completely different "spheres" than HN, and results in people thinking nothing is raised (which appears not true from what I came across).

I will try to write those down for the future and share back.

Right! I'm European but HN really is my only news source for things like this. Care to point out some main places in these completely different "spheres"?

Please note I didn't want to be pedantic with "spheres", first :-) Just trying to pick a word reflecting that HN has a focus on only a part of what exists.

It's mostly via twitter that I see those, but here are examples this week:

- http://www.rudebaguette.com/2012/11/26/teleportd-nitrogram-i... ($1M)

- http://www.pehub.com/174632/youscribe-raises-e2-million/ (€2M)

- http://frenchweb.fr/la-ruche-qui-dit-oui-leve-15-million-eur... (€1.5M)

I'l add:

- http://www.rudebaguette.com/2012/10/11/iadvize/ (€1M)

- http://www.rudebaguette.com/2012/10/17/clever-cloud-launch/ (amount not disclosed)

From their history[0]:

> At the end of May 2010, Julien Tartarin and Wilfried Durand meet...

> We pull all-nighters and the product takes shape. A bêta version is launched after Le Web 2010. The first version goes live in February 2011. One year after, Mailjet gathers more thant 15 collaborators and sends tens of millions each week!

Also, check their job offers page [1]

I'd say they're already on cruise mode, and gathering people and funds to grow. Here investments of such scale are reserved to low risk, well established start-ups.

[0] http://www.mailjet.com/About-us.htm

[1] http://www.mailjet.com/jobs

Interesting to note that two of the founders (Thibaud Elziere and Quentin Nickmans) seem to have raised €1.64 million for one of their other startup (TextMaster) 10 days ago from the same VC firm [1].

Apparently, eFounders (that participated in this round) is their incubator where they are building other French startups.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/19/textmaster/

You know, I'm a developer and not a business type, so when I see a headline like this, my immediate first thought is "isn't email a solved problem? Aren't there already a ton of providers for this type of service?"

So imagine my surprise that someone is raising millions of dollars to have another whack at it.

It's always good to be reminded that solving big, new problems isn't necessarily more important to people than solving small, existing problems better.

> "Aren't there already a ton of providers for this type of service?"

So many. However, it's a very large market that is still seeing plenty of growth, and being able to reach your captive audience reliably and consistently is still a problem, especially when your customers may be in different parts of the world.

Deliverability is a different case in other parts of the world, funny enough. Different gatekeepers and even processes sometimes.

As a developer who has good business sense I immediately look at their pricing. I am very impressed, this pretty much blows the other services out of the water. Switching to mailjet would save me thousands of $ a year, I was already in the proccess of doing so before this came up on hackernews (no idea it was a new start-up I found it via google).

Congratulations to everyone involved on the investment.

My mailjet wish list: - fully implemented transactional email reporting (currently campaign only) - email receipt and delivery acknowledgement on their event api (currently only reporting bounces, opens, and clicks ) - better helpdesk/support interface ( no way to read closed tickets, no defined process for escalating or closing tickets) - more responsive support ( e.g. same day response for 'critical' tickets would be nice )

Clickable link to the product (which I'm trying out):

http://www.mailjet.com

Had another one of our accounts mysteriously locked by Google (yes, we still use them as a relay) so tried Mailjet out today.

Does what it says on the tin! Was setup in minutes, the helpful page on DKIM and SPF was a nice touch, now we're working through the email backlog.

This has certainly upped the competition for newletters services like mailchimp, campaign monitor, aweber, etc. The price is going to sink them.

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