Sendoso Bags $100 Million Funding in Series C Investment Rounds

Corporate gifting is going from strength to strength, and Sendoso is the latest company to have nabbed a whole lot of money from their investment rounds.

Thanks largely in part to new backer SoftBank, via its Vision Fund 2, along with old investors such as Oak HC/FT, Struck Capital, Stage 2 Capital, Craft Ventures, Signia Venture Partners and Felicis Ventures, Sendoso has accumulated $100 million worth of funding.

As a little background, Sendoso is an "end-to-end" gifting platform that specialises in corporate swag, gift cards, flowers, sweet treats and so much more.

The platform offers more than 30,000 products, arranging all of the complicated logistics and sending. In theory, if you have to get on the good side of around 200 companies and a few of them are ignoring you, you could then click a button and send them all some branded AirPods,  cupcakes or booze. 

US gifting platform Sendoso to establish Irish operation after $100m raise

Sendoso were already doing well, but the pandemic really kicked and awful lot into gear, speeding up their growth exponentially. Explaining how he came up with the concept, CEO and co-founder Kris Rudeegraap said:

"I was manually packing boxes, grabbing swag, coming up with handwritten notes.

"It was inefficient, but it worked so well. So I dreamed up an idea: why not be able to click a button in Salesforce to do this automatically? Sometimes the best company is one that solves a pain point of your ownโ€.

Sendoso now works with more than 20,000 customers, which includes the likes of Comcast, Kimpton Hotels, Thomson Reuters, Nasdaq and eBay.

Explaining the growth during lockdown, Rudeegraap added:

"Everyone was stuck at home by themselves, saturated with emails. Having a personal connection to sales prospects, employees and others just meant more".

Martech expert and MA contributor Adam Clarke echoes this point:  

Gifts have always been used to help remove inertia in the sales process and Sendoso, like London based Huggg have been in the right place at the right time with lunches, dinners and physical industry events falling out of favour over the past 18 months." 

While Rudeegraap won't disclose the worth of his company publicly, it is estimated to be around $640 million, as he once implied that it was worth four-times more than its Series B funding, which came in at an - again estimated - $160 million.

As Adam mentions, the business model is not without its risks as business begins to return to normal: 

It will be interesting to see if entertaining budgets stay with the marketing departments and continue to support B2B Account Base Marketing campaigns in the future, but as things continue to open back up I can see more than a few sales directors itching for their company credit cards back. $100m is a big punt on things not going back to the way they were. 

However, as Martech Alliance CEO Carlos Doughty, with the importance of connected experiences, it's a solution that marketers will continue to find extremely valuable: 

A core pillar of great CX is delivering both physical and digital connected experiences. So integrating a martech solution that can deliver physical and digital gifting as part of your omnichannel marketing strategy will only become more pertinent.