South Australian AI-powered email marketing platform Nitrosend has officially launched to the public today, the company’s founders claiming it will save time and money for businesses.
And it has launched with USD$500,000 (AUD$701,000) in seed funding courtesy of Eastend Ventures, South Australia’s first Early Stage Venture Capital Limited Partnership.
Nitrosend was created by brothers Edward and George Hartley, who previously founded SmartrMail – another email marketing platform that was sold to Relay Commerce in 2022 for an undisclosed sum. The duo was also the founders of online art market BlueThumb.
“This isn’t their first rodeo,” Eastend Ventures founding partner Josh Garratt said.
“They’ve built and sold a successful email marketing business before, and now they’re back to do it again for an AI world.
“Experienced founders going after a market they already understand better than anyone, at exactly the moment that market is being reshaped by AI. That’s the kind of investment Eastend was built to make.”
Nitrosend was built for small and mid-sized businesses that live online. The platform was aiming to replace traditional email builders; instead of dragging and dropping blocks around an editor, business owners describe what they want their email campaign to do.
The platform then writes it, designs it, sends it and reports back on what worked.
“There’s this massive gap in the AI segment for transactional and marketing emails,” Edward said.
“Businesses I’ve been helping easily spend between 45 minutes and an hour writing and editing an email, which is quite a lot of time, particularly if your business has a big email list and you want to send two to three times a week.
“You can do a prompt, and in five minutes you can have a very well-written email, and it’s beautifully designed.”
While the product officially launched today, it had been in beta mode since April. So far, about 190 users have been onboarded, with the volume of emails being produced doubling every week since.
Edward said the Eastend Ventures funding would give the company an early-stage runway.
“We get our engineers on board, we keep building product, we invest in some growth channels and we launch and scale it really hard and fast,” he said.
“We’ve seen how similar players that are not in the AI space necessarily can scale email, and it can be rapid if you reduce friction, and that’s even without the kind of AI that we’ve built.
“We think Nitrosend could be huge and from here it’s really about keep building the product, keep the distribution and keep the awareness so that people know about it.”