In an age where communication is only a smartphone away, a Boulder-based startup has raised capital to support its bet on text messages being the best way to reach customers.
TextUs, a business texting platform, announced a $5 million initial close of its Series B funding and an expanded debt facility.
The company provides text messaging software and a real-time communication platform designed to improve how businesses communicate with their leads, candidates and customers.
The system allows customers to turn personalized text messaging campaigns into 1:1 conversations, manage multiple conversations from a single inbox and schedule text messages, all while integrating voice and texting outreach in a single dashboard tied directly to their ATS or CRM.
The company intends to use these funds for strategic investment in product expansion, team development and customer satisfaction.
"We’ll also be widening the number of customer verticals as well as growing our international presence," CMO and co-founder Andrew Kimmell told Colorado Inno.
In March 2019, TextUs expanded internationally, opening an office in Krakow, Poland. The company currently serves sales, staffing and recruiting, SaaS, higher education, HR, healthcare, property management, financial services and nonprofits.
The company currently employs 52 full time employees, and plans to add two new leadership roles, as well as expand its engineering and voice services teams, Kimmell said.
"We love Boulder," he added. "There's very little to complain about operating a business out of one of the best cities to live in the world. We have approximately twelve employees that work remotely from Portland to St. Louis to Boston who all love coming to Boulder for team meetings."
The company, which launched in 2013, unveiled its new real-time communication platform, TextUs Next last year and will continue building on that product moving forward
"We’re just seeing the beginning of a new trend taking hold in the use of text messaging for business. The old way of using a 5-digit shortcode number to send promotional SMS is shifting to the 10-digit number and a conversational approach to text messaging," Kimmell said. "At TextUs, we’ve been pioneering this new approach and we’re looking to innovate with text messaging as the core base of a broader real-time communication platform."
