Postscript

Postscript was founded in Phoenix, Arizona in 2018 by Alex Beller, Adam Turner, and Colin Turner, who went through a Y Combinator batch (the company was profiled by TechCrunch during a YC cohort in February 2019) with the pitch of becoming 'the Mailchimp for SMS.' The founders' thesis was that email had become bloated and impersonal while consumer behavior and e-commerce traffic had shifted decisively to mobile, creating an opening for a purpose-built SMS marketing and two-way conversational commerce platform. From the outset, Postscript chose to go deep rather than broad, building exclusively for the Shopify and Shopify Plus ecosystem instead of pursuing a horizontal, multi-platform, all-in-one marketing suite — a positioning it has maintained and marketed heavily against generalist competitors ever since.

The company raised a $4.5M seed round in December 2019 (led by Accomplice, with backing from a notable group of operator-angels including Klaviyo's Andrew Bialecki, Kayak's Paul English, Wufoo's Kevin Hale, Drift's Elias Torres, Front's Mathilde Collin, and Podium's founders), at which point it had 14 employees and roughly 530 Shopify customers. Growth accelerated sharply through 2020, and by early 2021 Postscript had grown to 61 employees and over 3,500 customers. On the strength of that growth, the company skipped a traditional Series A and raised a $35M Series B in March 2021 led by Greylock, with Greylock partners Sarah Guo and Mike Duboe joining the board; YC, 1984 Ventures, Ali Capital, Elephant VC, and NFL Hall-of-Famer Larry Fitzgerald also participated.

Postscript continued to scale rapidly through 2021 and into 2022, more than doubling revenue and its Shopify brand base to over 8,500 merchants (including Brooklinen, Homesick, Native, Spikeball, and Kopari), while growing headcount to roughly 230 employees. In June 2022 it announced a $65M Series C led by former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo's fund 01 Advisors, with new participation from Twilio Ventures, Expanding Capital, and m]x[v Capital alongside existing backers Greylock, Accomplice, Elephant, and OpenView — bringing total venture funding to over $100M (third-party estimates from Sacra put cumulative funding in the $106M–$138M range and pegged the round's valuation at roughly $636M). CEO Adam Turner said the raise was driven by SMS's outsized ROI for merchants (Postscript cited a roughly 25x average return) even as paid social costs rose, and by an ambition to expand SMS penetration in U.S. e-commerce toward levels seen in markets like China's WeChat commerce.

Business model

B2B SaaS; usage/tier-based subscription (Free, Growth, Professional, Enterprise plans) billed per SMS/MMS volume plus platform fees, sold as a Shopify App Store app and direct enterprise contracts; also offers a managed-service add-on (Postscript Plus) and AI/CashBack add-on products.

Recurring SaaS subscription plus per-message (SMS/MMS/RCS) usage fees; managed-service and premium AI feature upsells.