Contacting Dollar$: E-mail Marketing Firm iContact Lands $5.35M

Durham, N.C. — iContact, the e-mail marketing firm formerly known as Broadwick, has landed $5.35 million in venture funding and is looking to nearly double its staff.

Initially seeking $4 million in funding, iContact ended up landing one third more.

The four-year-old company recently moved to new offices in Durham and also changed the name of its lead product, Intellicontact, to iContact.

Updata Partners led the funding round. Carter Griffin of Updata will join iContact’s board. Updata has offices in Reston, Va., and New Jersey.
IDEA Fund Partners, which is based in the Triangle and is a new for-profit
fund launched by NC IDEA, also participated.

With the funding, iContact plans to expand its staff to more than 100 over the next 18 months from the current 58. Chairman Aaron Houghton and Chief Executive Officer Ryan Allis co-founded the company.

“This funding will allow iContact to move to the next level,” Allis said in a statement.“Our rock star team has built an amazing company over the past four years,” he added. “We have worked hard to bring the best e-mail marketing, blogging, and RSS feed web application in the world to our customers. It is our mission to be the leading worldwide provider of on-demand software that makes online communication easy. With this capital infusion, we can move even more quickly.”

iContact plans to expand marketing efforts and further develop its e-mail marketing package. iContact has 11,500 customers and more than 90,000 users.

The software packages a variety of capabilities reaching far beyond e-mail with blogs, surveys, autoresponders, and other enhancements.

“iContact is an established leader and innovator in areas where we see tremendous growth and opportunity, serving small-to-medium sized businesses with sophisticated, integrated online marketing solutions in an on-demand delivery platform,” Griffin said in a statement. “We look forward to working with the dynamic team at iContact to rapidly scale the company.”