OutboundEngine Announces $16M Series C Funding

We’re excited to share a milestone that we’ve been working toward for a long time: OutboundEngine has raised $16 million in Series C financing, led by Austin-based S3 Ventures. Our existing investors, Silverton Partners, FLOODGATE, Noro-Moseley Partners, Capital Factory, Harmony Partners and Altos Ventures also contributed to the round.

You can read the official press release here, but we’d like to take a moment to share what this funding means for the company, our customers and our employees.

Why Raise Money Now?

With almost 8,000 customers, we feel confident we’ve built a product that solves a real problem for small business owners. But there are more than 28 million small businesses in the United States alone, so we’ve barely scratched the surface. This fresh capital will allow OutboundEngine to grow aggressively and bring a broader variety of professional marketing capabilities to even more businesses.

What We Plan to Invest In

• Platform depth and breadth. A business’s next sale is highly likely to be a repeat customer or a referral from a previous customer. OutboundEngine works our customers’ networks to find the people who are likely to buy again or refer a friend, and then prep those people for a conversation. So far, we’ve had great success using email and social media to generate conversations. We’re going to get better at those channels and add new ones.
• Intelligence. There’s a big opportunity to leverage data and machine learning to make OutboundEngine more responsive to customer engagement and to create a more seamless interaction between our customers and their clients.
• Expand into new industries. Our goal is to bring the benefits of marketing automation to as many small businesses as we can, so it’s essential for us to learn how to serve new segments of the SMB market. We’ll identify industries where we can make a difference, learn what they need and deliver a product that creates real value.
• People. Expanding our platform and serving new markets is going to take a lot of work, and we need people to get it done. There are 238 Enginites now, and we’ll hire across all departments, in both our Austin and Scottsdale offices, until we have more than 400 employees.
• Office space. We’ve outgrown our Austin headquarters and are in the process of building out a new, 40,000-square-foot space in downtown Austin. Being surrounded by downtown’s energy and startup ecosystem are integral to our culture, and we’re excited to continue being part of the downtown community.

What Funding Means for Employees and Customers

First and foremost, we hope that both employees and customers see this for what it is: a vote of confidence in our product, people and mission as well as a major boost toward achieving our next level of growth.

Customers will see ongoing improvements to our core product, efforts we’ve already begun with projects like our recently redesigned home page. They’ll also start getting access to new add-on features and optional specialty content, allowing them to deliver even more targeted, segmented messages to their lists. We’re confident this will result in driving even more sales, with minimal effort on the customer’s part.

Employees get to experience the excitement of a new office, more team members and opportunities for advancement as we add positions to our team. We’ll also continue to make operational improvements to create a smoother-running workplace and invest in culture to maintain our reputation as one of Austin’s Best Places to Work, even as we double in size.

The Bottom Line

Getting funding is hard, but putting new capital to work efficiently is even harder. We’re excited by the challenge and for the plans we have to build an even better company for our customers, employees and everyone else who’s supported us along the way.