Mailchimp, an Atlanta-based marketing platform for small business, has acquired local startup Sawa, an automated graphic design platform.
Founded in 2017, Sawa received small amounts of funding from local accelerators and bootstrapped the rest of its funding. Sawa’s founder and sole employee, Francis Tao, will join the Mailchimp team as a senior product manager to integrate Sawa’s technology into their platform.
"Sawa’s mission and vision is to allow small medium businesses and marketers to create beautiful design content created for them as quickly as we can think," he said. "We’ve always felt like when we try to set out to solve this problem, there’s a lot of people who are able and willing to drive engagement for their business. But there’s a bottleneck of the resources and time they have to get the beautiful content they need. And that bottleneck is what we set out to solve. We'll be solving the exact same thing with Mailchimp."
Sawa isn't changing much, or even at all, in Tao's mind.
"We’re just going to be executing that within the Mailchimp platform," he said.
The acquisition is the second for Mailchimp---having acquired TinyLetter in 2011---and the first Techstars Atlanta startup to be acquired.
“As the worldwide network that helps entrepreneurs succeed, it’s our mission to help our founders achieve their vision," Daniel Feld, SVP of accelerators at Techstars, said in a statement. "We’re incredibly proud of Francis and his team in realizing this next step in Sawa’s journey, and so excited to see the impact our Techstars Atlanta Accelerator, in partnership with Cox Enterprises is having on entrepreneurs and companies in Atlanta.”
Tao said he's excited to join the team because he sees the direct fit between Sawa and Mailchimp.
"It genuinely feels like one of those relationships where both people feel really needed and appreciated," he said. "For Sawa we feel like this vision of creating instant, beautiful on-brand designs, we’ll be able to accomplish that vision faster and also in a broader way in Mailchimp across landing pages, social ads...email, all the avenues Mailchimp supports."
The core principles of company culture are similar between Sawa and Mailchimp, Tao said: hire great people, humility and valuing the customer experience.
"My personal faith was a big motivator for me to strive beyond personal profit," he said. "Team members are viewed as people and their personal success is a priority to the company, striving to lead a startup without throwing our families under the bus...(It's) a match made in heaven on the culture side."
