Sendy, a blockchain-based email start-up, today announced a successful US$ 500k seed round featuring the likes of leading Australasian digital asset funds Techemy Capital and Apollo Capital. Sendy aims to solve an ever-growing problem for email marketers: getting customers to engage with their email marketing campaigns.
While email marketing has time and again proven to deliver the highest ROI for marketers, a growing spam problem has led to a constant decline in engagement rates across all industries. Indeed, Statista reported that as much as 50% of emails sent in March 2018 were classified as spam.
“It is becoming progressively harder for legitimate marketers to get in front of their customers and the statistics are showing this. The real problem lies in the failure to value user attention adequately. With Sendy, we have an opportunity to add real value to email and deliver greater results for marketers by helping them stand out of the crowd,” said co-founder George Hartley.
In order to improve engagement, Sendy is building an open API that enables marketers on any email platform to improve their engagement rates by attaching a reward pool of digital tokens with their email campaigns. By simply engaging with these emails, users can claim their stake and be rewarded in Sendy’s token for their attention.
To minimise any friction in adopting digital currency within their network, users on Sendy are able to receive tokens with no effort on their behalf. After accumulating tokens, they will be able to use their tokens within the Sendy ecosystem to access loyalty programs with marketers, exchange them for other virtual currencies or even donate them to charitable causes.
“Sendy has devised an interesting way to increase engagement and reward attention to email marketing with token incentives. They are team of proven entrepreneurs who have built existing businesses from the ground up in the email space. This is what we look for beyond all else - teams with a strong track record of successful execution and Sendy has this in spades,” said Henrik Andersson, CIO and Co-Founder at Apollo Capital.
The team behind Sendy are also responsible for building email marketing tools Sendicate and SmartrMail, having spent the last five years improving the email space. SmartrMail last year raised a $500K AUD seed round through the Sydney Angels and went through the reputable Startmate Accelerator backed by Blackbird Ventures. The platforms collectively serve 7000 active users, sending over 1 billion emails per year to 72 million email subscribers. When Sendy launches, users on both apps will be able to attach tokens to their email campaigns.
“User acquisition is a challenge for products in every industry. With Sendy, the team is able to leverage their existing user base on Sendicate and SmartrMail to give the project immediate scale at launch. While blockchain technology is surely going to change how we do many things in the long term, Sendy is an exciting near-term solution to a common problem for marketers,” said Fran Strajnar, CEO at Techemy Capital.
Along with the seed funding, the team recently celebrated the addition of Dave Bean, Head of Sales at Earn.com, to their advisory board. Earn.com is a platform for sending and receiving digital currency for completing microtasks. In April, Earn.com was acquired for US$100M by prominent digital currency exchange Coinbase.
Sendy is raising a total of US$19 million through an initial coin offering and is currently in the pre-sale phase for funds and private investors. A public crowdsale is slated to take place later this year.
About Sendy
Sendy is radically transforming email by building a decentralised email platform that enables email marketers to attach tokens (SNDY) to their email campaigns, rewarding their subscribers through micro-payments for engagement. Sendy is platform agnostic, meaning current email marketing services can adopt Sendy tokens (SNDY) into their current infrastructure, and subscribers have a frictionless reward system built in.
Further information on the Sendy project, including the whitepaper, can be found at www.sendy.network.
**This article was provided through a newswire and does not express the views or opinions of 61-Bit.
