Sending transactional emails may seem like a solved problem. SendGrid, Postmark, Mailgun and others offer dependable email APIs for developers, after all. However, many of those companies have also been acquired in the last few years and haven’t necessarily kept up with the latest development trends — or at least that’s what startups like Resend are betting on.
Resend, which participated in the Y Combinator Winter ’23 batch, today announced a $3 million seed funding round. While Y Combinator and SV Angel participated in this round, the team mostly focused on raising from a wide range of angel investors, including Elad Gil, Lachy Groom, Figma’s Dylan Field, Vercel’s Guillermo Rauch, Supabase’s Paul Copplestone and Segment founder Calvin French-Owen.
Resend, which is also the company behind the popular React Email open source project, provides developers with an API to build email support into their applications easily. Since its launch in January, 10,000 developers have used the platform to send more than 7 million transactional emails.
Image Credits: Resend
As Resend CEO and co-founder Zeno Rocha told me, he regularly encountered issues with sending emails during his previous career at companies like Liferay, where he became chief product officer, and WorkOS. “I’ve been a developer my whole life and I’ve worked in different capacities, but every single company I’ve worked at, I had to do something related to email — transactional emails or marketing emails,” he said. “And I’ve always been really frustrated with every single player that I used. So you have SendGrid and Mailgun — and I’ve always felt that they could be good products for others but maybe not for myself as a technical person.”
He noted that observability was one of the main problems he encountered. It was hard to know if emails were being delivered. “I always felt that we didn’t have the tools to really approach it. I have to become an email expert and the platforms are not necessarily helping me achieve that.”
At the core of Resend is React Email, which ensures that an email will look like the designer intended it to, no matter where a user opens it. React Email provides developers with all of the necessary components to build emails. Rocha also noted that the team is obviously very close to the NextJS community, making Vercel co-founder and CEO an obvious choice for an angel investor.
With Resend, all a developer has to do is create an account and the service will provide the boilerplate code for virtually every popular programming language to send an email (and there is a free developer tier that is good for up to 3,000 emails per month).
Rocha noted that many of his competitors have to add more friction to the developer signup flow to combat bad actors who want to send phishing emails and spam. With Resend gaining popularity, it’s also beginning to face these issues. However, Rocha is confident that the company’s internal tool, “Robocop,” can identify and counteract such behavior.
The founding team, including Bu Kinoshita and Jonni Lundy, is currently concentrating on email. However, according to Rocha, the team envisions a significantly broader scope. “The vision for the company is not to become the next SendGrid — we want to be the next Twilio. I feel like we have a great chance to do that if we stay true to that developer persona.”