SparkPost Inc., a startup helping to deliver more than a third of the world’s commercial emails, today announced that it has raised $180 million in fresh funding from LLR Partners, NewSpring Capital and PNC Bank.

The valuation at which the round was raised isn’t being disclosed. 

SparkPost, based in Columbia, Maryland, provides a cloud service that companies rely on to send emails to customers. The service is used by Adobe Systems Inc., Twitter Inc. and many other organizations for tasks ranging from distributing newsletters to targeting shoppers with product promotions. Overall, SparkPost processes 4 trillion to 5 trillion messages annually, which it says amounts to more than 37% of the world’s business-to-consumer and business-to-business emails.

The startup’s key differentiator is a set of analytics features it  provides atop its core email sending capability. SparkPost gives companies data on what percentage of recipients open their emails, how long they spend reading messages and related metrics. Marketing teams can tweak their campaigns based on the information to increase engagement.

The other focus of SparkPost’s analytics features is helping companies improve email deliverability. Promotional messages don’t always reach the intended recipient due to sending issues, inbox filtering and various other technical factors, which can translate into lost revenue. A monitoring dashboard built into SparkPost’s service enables marketing teams to identify any deliverability problems that may be making it difficult to reach customers.

The campaign insights the service provides come in part from a global email network operated by the startup that it says collects more than a trillion “message events.” SparkPost also gives customers access to data about competitors’ email campaigns, such as their bounce and engagement rates. 

“This investment will help fuel product innovation and acquisitions as we expand our intelligent email platform and enable our customers to get the most from their email programs,” SparkPost Chief Executive Rich Harris wrote in a blog post today.

The round will also give the startup the option of making more acquisitions to complement organic product development initiatives. SparkPost’s most recent acquisition was in 2019, when it absorbed a firm called eDataSource that had developed software for measuring email deliverability.

SparkPost has raised more than $270 million from investors to date. 

Image: SparkPost