For two decades, Mailchimp has worked to help small businesses grow. Along the way, the company that specializes in email marketing has experienced plenty of growth of its own. What started out in a tiny office on the west side of Atlanta, as mentioned by CEO and co-founder Ben Chestnut in a company blog post, is now a unicorn 10 times over. The company also bootstrapped itself the entire way.
Now, Mailchimp is gearing up to grow even more by joining forces with fintech company Intuit in a $12 billion cash and stock transaction.
Mailchimp has come a long way without securing venture funding from outside investors, and this deal marks the largest ever for a privately held bootstrapped company, according to Axios.
Since its inception in 2001, Mailchimp started out offering email marketing solutions to SMBs. Two-thirds of small businesses are challenged when it comes to finding new customers, and more than a quarter of them encounter difficulty in customer retention, according to the company. This is where Mailchimp comes in.
Today, the company’s AI-driven solution serves a global user base 13 million people strong with tools for customer engagement and marketing automation. It has 2.4 million monthly active users and 800,000 paid customers on its platform, which fuels 2.2 million predictions a day.
Intuit developed financial service tools TurboTax, Credit Karma, Mint and QuickBooks that 100 million customers around the world use for help with their finances. With the acquisition of Mailchimp, Intuit will accelerate toward its goal of becoming the center of small business growth and disrupting the mid-size business market.
As both Intuit and Mailchimp work to solve challenges for SMBs, the two make a sound match-up to go forward and develop new solutions. Through the acquisition, businesses will be able to combine their customer data from Mailchimp with purchase data from QuickBooks to get the actionable insights needed to grow their business.
“Over the past two decades, we’ve vastly expanded and evolved Mailchimp’s platform to help millions of small businesses around the world start and grow,” Chestnut said in a statement. “With Intuit, we’ve found a shared passion for empowering small businesses. By joining forces with Intuit, we’ll take our offerings to the next level, leveraging Intuit’s AI-driven expert platform to deliver even better products and services to small businesses. This is an exciting new chapter for Mailchimp, our 1,200-plus dedicated employees and customers.”
The transaction is set to close by the end of Q2 2022. In the meantime, Mailchimp is currently hiring for several Atlanta-based positions. Open roles span the company’s corporate strategy, customer, design, finance, marketing, people and product teams.