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."