Messaging Startup SendHub Raises $2M From Kapor, Menlo Ventures, 500 Startups, Angels & Others

SendHub, the YC-backed messaging service which has been growing like crazy this year, has just scored $2 million in seed funding in a round led by Kapor Capital, and with participation from Menlo Ventures, 500 Startups, Howard Lindzon’s Social Leverage fund, Bronze Investments, as well as angels Eric Ries, Jawed Karim, Paul Buchheit and a handful of private angel investors.

Nope, not a bad lineup for a seed round. And the reason? SendHub is seeing both decent growth and revenue, it seems.

For those unfamiliar with SendHub, it’s a service built on top of Twilio’s scalable voice platform that allows businesses to communicate with their customers using text messages which are sent out via web or mobile. Customers opt-in by texting a keyword the business chooses.

Offered as a freemium service, SendHub also wants to provide a way for teachers to send messages to students and parents for free – in fact, that’s how the initial idea for the startup was formed. Co-founder Garrett Johnson had originally wanted to build a communication system for his nephew’s school in Tampa, Florida, and those plans later became SendHub.

While the free level of service works for teachers, businesses generally need to pay for premium levels of service, which provide them with access to more messages per month and the ability to reach more contacts.

Within the first month of offering its premium plan, SendHub saw revenue of $62,000, co-founder Ash Rust tells us. Self-serve revenue has also continued to grow in April, and they’re at about 40% average week-over-week growth right now, he says. However, there’s an outlier that’s affecting the average, so removing it, they’re at around 12% week-over-week growth. YC partner Paul Graham previously said that its growth looked like Airbnb in the early days.

In February of this year, the company reported sending out 30,000 messages per month. By March, it was sending out that many per week. Today, the company is declining to share specifics, but says they’ve been aiming for over 10% week-over-week message and user growth and have been “more than meeting that goal.”

The additional funding will be used for hiring (obviously!) to expand from its team of five (the founders recently brought in a couple of engineers and a designer, they noted on their blog today). Also on the road map, enterprise-friendly features and “moving up the food chain.” Explains Rust, “the land line market in the U.S. is still $50 billion; we provide a very affordable alternative and will be going after those users,” he says.

So, mostly a good day over there for Mountain View-based (soon to be Palo Alto-based) SendHub. Well, it is now.