MessageBird B.V., a Dutch startup with a so-called omnichannel communications platform for managing customer interactions, has raised $800 million in funding to acquire SparkPost Inc., a U.S.-based rival.

The startup is paying $600 million for SparkPost. Both the acquisition and the funding, which comes as an extension to a $200 million Series C round MessageBird announced last October, were made public this morning.

The extension turns the Series C round into one of the largest startup investments in recent memory and among the biggest ever raised by a European tech firm.

MessageBird’s omnichannel communications platform helps companies interact with their customers online. The platform can be used to launch email marketing campaigns, send shoppers text messages with discount codes when they browse an e-commerce site and process support inquiries through apps such as WhatsApp. MessageBird says that by centralizing customer interactions in one product, it allows companies to operate more efficiently than they could by using multiple separate tools for the task. 

Columbia, Maryland-based SparkPost, the startup MessageBird is buying, focuses on a narrower slice of the market: sending emails. Its namesake cloud service is used to distribute more than third of the world’s business-to-consumer emails, according to internal estimates. Use cases for the platform range from sending news updates to delivering personalized marketing promotions.

MessageBird is buying the startup for several reasons. One is the upselling opportunity: Chief Executive Officer Robert Vis (pictured) told TechCrunch that the company will seek to convince clients of SparkPost’s email service to adopt MessageBird for customer communications across other channels. SparkPost’s clients include Adobe Systems Inc., Pinterest Inc. and other big names.

Another factor behind the acquisition is that the deal will help MessageBird, which is currently mainly active in Europe and Asia, to grow its U.S. presence. The company disclosed to Reuters that the addition of SparkPost’s revenue will bring its global annual sales to $500 million.

SparkPost’s analytics features for optimizing email campaigns factored into the deal’s hefty price tag as well. “Its analytics products are stronger than its competitors, which allows for better inbox placement and delivery — and that’s exactly what our customers want to optimize,” Vis wrote in a blog post.

The deal represents a quick return for the investors who took part in SparkPost’s $180 million funding round this past January. As for the $800 million round MessageBird raised to finance the transaction, it reportedly values the startup at $3.4 billion. The more than dozen participants in the round included Tiger Global, BlackRock, Accel and Y Combinator.

Because the SparkPost acquisition is valued at $600 million, MessageBird should have about $200 million left over from the new funding. Given that a major motivation behind the deal is to unlock upselling opportunities, the startup might spend a portion of the remaining capital on growing its sales team. Additional deals are a possibility as well given that the purchase of SparkPost follows two smaller startup acquisitions MessageBird announced just a few weeks ago.

Photo: MessageBird