Userlist Closes a Pre-Seed Round with 21 Angel Investors

We're excited to announce that Userlist has closed its pre-seed round. It took us 4 months to raise funding from 21 angel investors. Read on to learn why we decided to raise, and who's on board.

Why we decided to raise

We set out on the fundraising journey this spring. After three years in the market, we finally had clarity about new features, positioning, and the competitive edge.

1. There isn't a clear choice for SaaS companies what email automation tool to use. Popular tools like Mailchimp, Intercom, ConvertKit, Customer.io, or Drip aren't focusing on SaaS companies, and can't serve their niche needs well. Userlist is there to fill in the gap.
2. Founders want all their email in one tool. Marketing email and customer email are still duct-taped together. There are no best practices — and no good tools — for making these communications work alongside each other. We stuck with customer messaging for a while, but time and research have shown that marketing email lists should live in Userlist, too. We're launching the marketing feature (forms, double opt-in, etc) in a few weeks.
3. Email marketing tools pretend that companies don't exist. Most popular tools still work with individual user data. While B2B SaaS companies are serving other companies, not individual users. We launched company accounts publicly in April 2021 and instantly converted multiple new customers. Founders were thrilled. Userlist discovered its competitive edge.

"Just want to say how 😍😍😍😍 the Userlist company feature is. I've been waiting YEARS for someone to do this right. You crushed it."
— Bryan Marble, founder of Client Rock

"This is game changing, and one of the main reasons we stuck with Intercom for so long, because they were the only ones to do this (and our SaaS has multiple users per company)."
— Devan Sabaratnam, co-founder of HR Partner

"Many-to-many is a game-changer. NO ONE supports many-to-many accounts. This is the only email marketing tool that gets SaaS."
— Keith Perhac, founder of Segmetrics

Having already raised a round of financing from TinySeed last year, we decided to raise another pre-seed round to execute on this vision.

What's next?

The funding will allow us to hire more developers, expand the marketing features, build more SaaS-driven integrations, and produce more content. Our goal is to solidify our positioning as an email marketing tool for SaaS, and make it a #1 choice for SaaS companies out there.

Who's on board?

We brought 21 awesome investors on board, all passionate about the SaaS industry. Among the names:

• Adam Wiggins (Muse, previously Heroku)
• Alan Park (Fluent U)
• Baird Hall (Churnkey / Zubtitle)
• Brady Cassidy and Kyle Fox (Rewardful)
• Carlos Hernandez (Quaderno)
• Cassidy Williams (Netlify)
• Charlie Irish (as himself)
• Christopher Bain (Humanoid Studios)
• Corey Haines (previously Baremetrics)
• Fredrik Björk (Grafbase)
• Iheanyi Ekechukwu (PlanetScale, previously GitHub)
• Joanna Wiebe (Copyhackers)
• Lisa Enckell (Antler) and Andreas Ehn (Wrapp, previously Spotify)
• Patrick Thompson (Iteratively / Amplitude)
• Randall Kent (Cypress.io)
• Ross Hudgens (Siege Media)
• Tracy Lee (This Dot Labs)
• Simon Williams (Instructure)
• Zach Holman (previously GitHub)

It's a great honor and pleasure to share our journey with these people. Huge thanks to everyone else who helped with the fundraising, made the intros, and cheered us along.

Onwards!

— Jane & Benedikt.