Automattic Values Business-Email Startup Titan at $300 Million

Titan, which provides a suite of professional email services for small and medium businesses, announced a $30 million investment from Automattic Inc. to grow its product.

The Series A funding from Automattic, the parent of self-publishing and blogging platform WordPress, values the startup at $300 million, Titan announced on Tuesday.

“Email got a significant boost when Gmail was introduced over 15 years ago but since then, there’s been no thought to re-imagining email for hundreds of millions of business accounts,” Titan founder and Chief Executive Officer Bhavin Turakhia said on a call. The startup wants to reinvent professional email for small business owners who are just setting up their digital operations, he said.

“We need an alternative to Google and Microsoft, which have started to monopolize email,” Matt Mullenweg, Automattic founder and CEO, said during the same call. “Of about 6 billion email accounts in the world, only a fraction are small business email accounts and they need a product that’s focused on their needs,” he said.

Titan’s features include timed emails, follow-up reminders, email templates and a calendar that can interact with other popular calendar services. It’s targeting partnerships with the top 10 global web hosts, domain registrars and site builders, each with tens of millions of customers. The company already has a tie-up with WordPress.com.

Founded in 2018, Titan is part of Nova, which also operates messaging and collaboration tool, Flock. Turakhia’s other startup is a banking platform Zeta Services Inc., which recently became a unicorn with funding from SoftBank Group Corp.

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