SendGrid, the leader in email deliverability, today announced that it has raised $21 million in a Series B round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Existing investors Foundry Group, Highway 12 Ventures, SoftTechVC, 500 Startups and Bullet Time Ventures also participated in the financing. SendGrid will use the funds to meet strong and growing global demand, accelerate hiring and continue to invest in product, developer relations and customer support.

Since launch in December 2009, SendGrid has transformed from a seed funded startup into one of the largest email platforms in the world, nearly tripling its customer base in 2011 alone. SendGrid now sends 2.6 billion emails per month for customers in more than 150 countries and tracks and reports more than 400 million events per day. SendGrid currently employs 70 people across its Boulder, Colo., and Anaheim, Calif. offices and is hiring both in the U.S. and abroad to meet strong global demand.

Forty thousand web applications companies and developers, including Pinterest, HootSuite and Path, currently use SendGrid to make email delivery simple for their applications. SendGrid's cloud-based SMTP platform provides a secure, scalable, and robust infrastructure that solves core transactional email deliverability issues, relieving the headaches of SMTP email infrastructure development and freeing development resources to focus on core business objectives.

"SendGrid's transactional email platform is emerging as a powerhouse in the platform-as-a-service space," said Byron Deeter, partner, Bessemer Venture Partners. "SendGrid has solidified its category leadership position with a great platform and an outstanding team. We look forward to helping SendGrid grow and command even more market share in the future."

"Web application companies are under tremendous pressure to build fantastic services quickly. Offloading a core service like transactional email management and delivery is a smart and simple choice," said Jim Franklin, CEO, SendGrid. "Today's funding validates our original vision and supports our global expansion plans as we continue to build out our team."

"This investment allows us to more quickly fulfill our original vision of making email simple and easy for developers everywhere," said Isaac Saldana, President and co-founder, SendGrid. "Although we intend to expand quickly, we will remain focused on developers by continuing the expansion of our market-leading platform, growing developer relations and providing outstanding support."

SendGrid is hiring across multiple job functions, including sales, marketing, operations and engineering. Interested candidates can visit http://sendgrid.com/jobs.html for more information.

About Bessemer Venture Partners Bessemer Venture Partners is a global venture capital firm with offices in Silicon Valley, Cambridge, Mass., New York, Mumbai and Herzliya, Israel. One of the longest standing venture capital practices in the United States, BVP has partnered as an active, hands-on investor in Ciena, LinkedIn, Celtel, Blue Nile, Skype, Staples and Yelp. More than 100 BVP-funded companies have gone public on exchanges in Canada, India, the U.K. and the United States. Learn more at www.bvp.com and www.bvp.com/cloud .

About SendGrid SendGrid is the leader in email deliverability. SendGrid's cloud-based platform increases email deliverability, provides actionable insight and scales to meet any volume of email, relieving businesses of the cost and complexity of maintaining custom email infrastructures. The email delivery platform of choice for 40,000 web application companies and developers, including foursquare, Pinterest, Airbnb, Twilio and Path, SendGrid delivers more than 2.6 billion emails per month. Founded in 2009 and based in Boulder, Colo., SendGrid is backed by Foundry Group, Highway 12 Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners and several notable individual investors.