Two South Australian siblings who’ve built their second email marketing startup, this time as an AI-native platform, having raised US$500,000 (A$700k) in Seed funding.
The round for Nitrosend was led by Eastend Ventures Fund 1, with support from Archangel Ventures and Aussie Angels.
The Adelaide startup was founded by Edward and George Hartley. Their previous startup, SmartrMail, became one of the highest rated marketing automation tools on Shopify, scaling to six billion emails sent, before being acquired by Relay Commerce in 2022.
For Nitrosend, the Hartley brothers have applied the lessons from their first venture to building a new AI marketing platform, rebuilding it from the ground up. It works straight from Claude, Chat GPT, or via the Nitrosend platform.
“Between us we’ve built two email platforms, sent over six billion emails, and scaled three technology companies. We’ve been on both sides of the email stack,” George said.
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“This is a tool we initially started for ourselves. We needed this, and it turns out other people wanted it too.”
For round two, the duo brought the SmartrMail team back together, with Kam Low, the former chief technology officer, signing on as a founding team member.
The platform is designed for the small and mid-sized businesses. Instead of having to drag blocks around a template editor, users describe what they want their email campaign to do, and Nitrosend writes, designs, and sends it, then reports what worked. It also works for setting up automated welcome emails, abandoned shopping cart workflows, customer segments and other tasks that traditionally required a dedicated marketing person or an agency.
Nitrosend has strong early traction, signing on 190 users since April, including fellow early stage startups Elita Genetics and Fast Lane.
Eastend Ventures founding partner Josh Garratt said one of the reasons they backed the Hartleys is “this isn’t their first rodeo”.
“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,” he said.
His colleague, JD Sheard, agrees.
“Ed, George and Kam are exactly that. The fact that the next leader in AI marketing software could be built out of Adelaide is the kind of story we want Australian venture capital to start telling,” he said.
