Philadelphia email marketing firm Postmark has been acquired by ActiveCampaign, a similar company headquartered in Chicago with a valuation topping $3 billion.
Founded in 2009, Postmark's delivery platform specializes in transactional emails like password resets, welcome emails and newsletters. Its business model hinges on being able to deliver emails to inboxes in seconds. ActiveCampaign is a marketing technology platform that allows sales and marketing teams to design and send automated emails.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. ActiveCampaign Vice President Shay Howe said that the acquisition is the company's largest to date.
The startup works with 150,000 businesses and reports annual revenue of $165 million. Last year, ActiveCampaign raised $240 million in Series C funding at a valuation of more than $3 billion. The company has more than 1,000 employees and will add more than 30 remote workers through the Postmark deal.
Occupying similar spaces in the marketing technology industry, ActiveCampaign first approached Postmark to discuss a potential partnership about a year ago, Postmark CEO Natalie Nagele said. Talks quickly evolved to a potential acquisition as the two firms found overlapping customers and gaps in their platforms that the other company could fill.
Transactional emails — triggered by an outside action like registering for an event or making an online purchase — are the focus of Postmark's operations and a feature ActiveCampaign has been looking to add to its offerings. ActiveCampaign's platform will now allow businesses looking to send out transactional emails a way to design and add messaging that fits their business.
Nagele said the two companies have "similar but different" audiences. Postmark is geared more toward software developers, but ActiveCampaign has more of a focus on marketing and sales. Now, ActiveCampaign hopes that Postmark's platform will allow marketing teams to send transactional emails that better align with the company's brand.
"From a business perspective, you can have a full lens and line of sight into all the messages you're sending to your customers," Howe said. "There's alignment across what that customer experiences and it's unified in that view, which is a pretty powerful thing that really hasn't happened in the industry to date."
Pricing to use ActiveCampaign's services starts at $9 per month, but its most popular service is its professional package, which is priced at $149 per month.
Postmark is a product of Wildbit, which is self-funded was founded by Nagele and her husband in 2000. Along with Postmark, ActiveCampaign will take over Wildbit's DMARC Digests, Postmark’s email authentication and monitoring service. Wildbit has two other products, People First Jobs and Beanstalk, which it will retain and Nagele will continue to run with her husband.
