Dyspatch wants to bring AMP-powered interactive email production to all marketers

Dyspatch, a no-code email production platform that helps marketers create dynamic interactive emails, has raised $6 million in a round of funding led by Google’s Gradient Ventures.

Despite the rise of team-collaboration and chat tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams, email continues to thrive as a communication conduit for businesses and consumers alike. Its asynchronous nature, meaning that people aren’t typically expected to respond to messages immediately, is particularly well-suited to a distributed workforce that operates across locations and time zones.

But in the same way as just about every service built on top of the internet has evolved through the years, there has been a big push to transition email beyond its static origins and make it something a little more dynamic — particularly where marketing is involved.

Founded out of Canada in 2013, Dyspatch has built a platform that allows marketers from major companies such as Canva to create emails collaboratively, with added support for accelerated mobile pages (AMP).

AMP it up

The AMP project has evolved greatly since Google first announced it back in 2015. In its original guise, the open source framework was designed to enable lightning-fast mobile web pages, but Google later extended support to emails — this was designed to bring web-like functionality and interactivity to a hitherto static medium. With AMP for email, marketers can update content within a message that has already been sent, ensuring that information is always up-to-date, while recipients can also complete forms and questionnaires like they might do on a website — without leaving the actual email message itself.

In the intervening years, AMP for email has gained support from email clients including Gmail (naturally), Yahoo Mail, and Mail.ru, as well as email services from companies such as Salesforce.

So in effect, Dyspatch merges collaborative email production functionalities similar to those in Stensul or the now-SparkPost-owned Taxi for Email, pairs it with AMP-powered interactive email functionality found in something like Mailmodo, and serves it all in a single email production interface.

“None of our competitors offer both collaborative email production plus AMP for email,” Dyspatch founder and CEO Matt Harris told VentureBeat.

The upshot is that anyone in a company can work together on building dynamic email campaigns. This might equate to embedding a shopping cart inside an email message, with the available stock inventory updating every time a person opens an email, or it may simply mean getting someone to choose from multiple meeting slots.

It’s worth noting that Dyspatch doesn’t actually send emails itself, it works purely on the production side — companies would typically integrate Dyspatch with their email service provider (ESP) of choice, such as Mailchimp, Sendgrid, and SparkPost. With another $6 million in the bank, the company also plans to develop integrations with other ESPs, such as Oracle and Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Given that Dyspatch has attracted Gradient Ventures as a lead investor, instinctively this would suggest that Dyspatch contains some kind of AI — but alas, that isn’t the case. However, it is now well-financed to continuing “leveling the playing field” for marketers.

“Most marketers are not coders — but they are the ones building the emails and sending them,” Harris said. “More often than not, they need developer help to build an email properly and to make sure it renders correctly. Dyspatch allows businesses to not only build their on-brand emails easily, but also to go above and beyond and build stand-out emails that actually result in engagement and conversions using AMP for Email.”

Y Combinator alum Dyspatch was previously known as Sendwithus before a rebrand in 2019. The company had previously raised around $5 million in seed funding, and for its latest cash injection it secured additional investments from Initialized Capital, Baseline Ventures, Blue Run Ventures, Scott Banister, and VanEdge Partners.