Hustle Secures $30 Million to Bolster Political and Education Sectors and Expand in New Markets

SAN FRANCISCO, May 1, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Hustle, a pioneer of peer-to-peer (P2P) messaging and the industry's most widely adopted text campaign platform with over 85 million text conversations initiated to date, announced today a $30 million Series B funding round led by Insight Venture Partners with participation from GV and Salesforce Ventures.  In conjunction with the financing, Hilary Gosher, Managing Director at Insight Venture Partners, will join the board.  This round brings the company's total funding to $42 million. The additional capital will be used to scale sales and engineering, and expand into new vertical markets.

"Hustle's exponential growth is rare, and reflects the company's substantial impact on how customers  engage their audiences," said Gosher of Insight. "Hustle has a tremendous opportunity to create jobs and bring value to new vertical markets and new use cases.  Insight looks forward to partnering with the Hustle team to drive the company's next stage of growth."

Hustle's funding comes on the heels of securing several prominent clients in the business and technology sectors including leading entertainment and ecommerce company, Live Nation. Hustle is already the leading P2P platform for advocacy groups like Sierra Club, and political campaigns including Bernie Sanders, Doug Jones, and over 25 state Democratic parties. The company expects to double in 2018, after triple growth in 2017.

"At Hustle, we're using technology to empower humans to be the best relationship workers they can be, instead of automating away their jobs. We're building a platform that empowers organizers, fundraisers, and salespeople to conduct hundreds of real-time personal conversations with their communities, to strengthen relationships through dialogue, and to make big asks when the moment is right,"  said Roddy Lindsay, co-founder and CEO at Hustle. "We're doubling down on our work in the civic and political sphere, and using it as a springboard to enter new enterprise markets. Relationships win supporters and votes, and relationships also win business."

The company has made significant advances to its platform in recent months ramping up its data science and engineering teams. Most recently, Hustle recruited Reddit's former head of data science Joe Gallagher to lead its efforts in better understanding the way text messaging can drive measurable results across different industries.

"We're proud to bring Insight and other investors on board who understand that a large part of our success can be attributed to our diverse teams," said Ysiad Ferreiras, Hustle's COO. "We are a company that is 51% women, 48% employees who identify as non-white, and 21% LGBTQ. Hustle has built a product that's empowering organizations and their members to solve real problems in this world -- and our teams' diverse perspectives are solving those problems faster."

About Hustle

Hustle is a peer-to-peer (P2P) messaging platform with a mission to strengthen relationships by scaling genuine human conversation. Since 2014, Hustle has helped hundreds of relationship-driven clients initiate more than 85 million personal texting conversations within their communities. Hustle is headquartered in San Francisco, California with offices in Washington D.C. For more information on Hustle, visit www.hustle.com.

About Insight Venture Partners

Insight Venture Partners is a leading global venture capital and private equity firm investing in high-growth technology and software companies that are driving transformative change in their industries. Founded in 1995, Insight has raised more than $18 billion and invested in over 300 companies worldwide. Our mission is to find, fund and work successfully with visionary executives, providing them with practical, hands-on growth expertise to foster long-term success. Across our people and our portfolio, we encourage a culture around a core belief: growth equals opportunity. For more information on Insight and all its investments, visit www.insightpartners.com or follow us on Twitter @insightpartners.

About Salesforce Ventures

Salesforce, the global leader in CRM, empowers companies to connect with their customers in a whole new way. Salesforce Ventures—the company's corporate investment group—invests in the next generation of enterprise technology that extends the power of the Salesforce Intelligent Customer Success Platform, helping companies connect with their customers in entirely new ways. Portfolio companies receive funding as well as access to the world's largest cloud ecosystem and the guidance of Salesforce's innovators and executives. With Salesforce Ventures, portfolio companies can also leverage Salesforce's expertise in corporate philanthropy by joining Pledge 1% to make giving back part of their business model. Salesforce Ventures has invested in more than 250 enterprise cloud startups in 14 different countries since 2009. For more information, please visit www.salesforce.com/ventures.

About Google Ventures

GV provides venture capital funding to bold new companies. In the fields of life science, healthcare, artificial intelligence, robotics, transportation, cyber security, and agriculture, GV's companies aim to improve lives and change industries. GV's team of world-class engineers, designers, physicians, scientists, marketers, and investors work together to provide these startups exceptional support on the road to success. Launched as Google Ventures in 2009, GV is the venture capital arm of Alphabet, Inc. GV helps startups interface with Google, providing unique access to the world's best technology and talent. For more information, please visit https://www.gv.com/.

 Contact: [email protected]  

SOURCE Hustle

Related Links

http://www.hustle.com