Email tech startup Loops raised $3.2M in early-stage funding

It’s not even six months old, and Maryland-based email startup Loops has already landed a $3.2 million investment in early-stage funding.

The recent round was led by Craft Ventures with additional participation from Liquid2, SV Angel, Soma, Box Group, Twenty Two Ventures, Arash Ferdowsi of Dropbox, Austen Allred of BloomTech, Sahil Bloom and other leaders from Dover and Lattice.

Loops, which was founded by Chris Frantz and Adam Kaczmarek, is a startup that created a platform for SaaS startups to send emails. Similar to those of larger companies like MailChimp and Hubspot, but created with SaaS startups in mind, Loops’s platform allows startup founders and employees to send emails, make sure they’re delivered, create product campaigns and send automated messages.

“Our goal is to move up in the early stage, grow within, build additional features and eventually move into market and enterprise while still remembering our route,” Frantz, who is from Frederick, Maryland, told Technical.ly.

Frantz said the company plans to use the funds to hire four or five engineers that can continue building the product, as well as a customer success professional. Alongside this funding round — Frantz noted that he and Kaczmarek actually turned down a larger funding offer, as well — Loops is also a Y Combinator accelerator company.

As Loops grows, Frantz would like to see transactional emails “live” in the platform. He hopes to eventually offer more tools like two-factor authentication within Loops’s services while maintaining a lower price point than its email industry peers. He also wants to add compatibility with platforms like AirTable.

“Why another startup today focused on email?” Frantz wrote in a post announcing the funding news. “We got that question a lot. Email is still kind of awful. Your devs know it. Your product team knows it. Your marketers really know it. The existing solutions today, many of which are publicly traded, have been around for 20+ years and it shows.”

Loops is not the first rodeo for either Frantz or Kaczmarek. The pair initially met while working at Silver Spring, Maryland’s CuriousityStream before founding Snazzy, an automated copywriting startup, in January of 2020. The pair sold the company to Vancouver’s Unbounce in May of last year for an undisclosed amount.

With a previous exit under their belts, Frantz noted that the experience helps sustain their confidence and knowledge moving forward.

“Having an exit kind of gives you light at the end of the tunnel, that you’re capable of creating something that people want to pay you for as a user and people want to buy,” Frantz said.