Email turns out to be highly profitable. Alternatively, it’s email communication software.
ContactMonkey, a Toronto-based platform that enables businesses to generate, transmit, and track internal communications using Outlook and other platforms, said today that Updata Partners led a $55 million Series A round of funding for the company.
Given that it’s a big round from a lone VC, what merited the enthusiastic vote of confidence? Maybe ContactMonkey’s success or the fact that up until recently, the company was entirely self-funded. 
“As employers continue to seek ways to better engage and retain talent, ContactMonkey is filling a key void in the market with their robust and user-friendly solution,” Updata partner Braden Snyder said in a statement. In the age of remote work, we think it’s critical for businesses to keep figuring out how to interact and connect with their staff in the most effective manner possible. ContactMonkey facilitates this kind of correspondence.
The new funding, according to ContactMonkey founder and CEO Scott Pielsticker, will be used to double the company’s 80-person workforce and grow into other markets, with a focus on developing the company’s sales and marketing departments.
Image Credits: ContactMonkey
Pielsticker founded Blueback, a London-based cab startup, before launching ContactMonkey. Pielsticker claims he identified a clear market need for a platform that would assist companies in emailing their staff, which is how ContactMonkey was born.
Pielsticker stated, “Our goal became to develop a beautiful product that teams could use, that was easy to use, and had important data and insights to improve internal communications.”
Naturally, “beautiful” and “user-friendly” are relative terms. However, ContactMonkey does live up to its promise of facilitating email communication between managers and employees. The software helps organise things like company announcements, alerts, and updates by integrating with Outlook, Gmail, Microsoft Teams, SMS, and HR information systems like Workday and ADP.
ContactMonkey’s engagement analytics enable users to create employee lists with segmentation, gather feedback, and monitor key performance indicators like open, click-through, and read rates.
According to Pielsticker, “companies today communicate with their employees in different ways.” “They could send emails with no engagement analytics, so businesses can’t even tell if their staff members read the message or found it interesting. Alternatively, they might send emails via a sales or marketing platform. These solutions may offer some data insights, but they also have drawbacks, such as enterprise-level security gaps, unsubscribe buttons, and delivery concerns. We provide a third option.
There are about a thousand users of ContactMonkey, and Pielsticker reports that the user base is steadily growing. Although he acknowledges that there are other competitors in the market for managing internal emails (see Staffbase and Mailchimp), he contends that ContactMonkey’s funding from Updata puts it in a strong position to take on the rivals.
Employers sought to preserve business culture and improve communication with their distant staff, which had a beneficial effect as a result of COVID-19. We believe that this investment will give us the breathing room we need to weather any market challenges, even though our industry is not experiencing a slowdown to the same extent as the broader tech sector.
