Rackspace Shoots Mailgun Off On Its Own

Sean Michael

Updated · Feb 27, 2017

Mailgun is once again on its own.

Cloud and hosting services vendor Rackspace acquired email platform vendor Mailgun back in 2012 and is now spinning Mailgun out on its own. Mailgun describes itself as an email automation platform for developers.

“Developers are at the heart of everything we do,” William Conway, CEO of Mailgun, said in a statement. “We are focused on solving the daily problems developers face when integrating and managing email inside of their applications.”

As part of the spin-out from Rackspace, Mailgun has raised $50 million in funding led by Turn/River Capital. Rackspace also participated in the funding along with Scaleworks.

“Our independence and influx of growth capital will allow Mailgun to drive a product vision that will thrill developers when they see what is coming down the pipe,” Conway said. “Turn/River Capital’s experience growing similar developer tools makes them a perfect match to help drive Mailgun’s continued growth.”

“Mailgun has grown consistently by providing the most scalable and developer friendly email sending infrastructure,” Dominic Ang, Turn/River Capital’s founder and Managing Partner, said in a statement. “It’s used daily by thousands of developers who build their app’s email communication entirely on top of Mailgun’s easy to use APIs.”

Rackspace itself has been undergoing significant changes of late. In November 2016, Rackspace was acquired by Apollo Global Management and taken private.

The company had been struggling in recent years to find its focus and core niche as competition in the hosting and cloud business heated up. In August 2016, Rackspace sold its Cloud Sites business to Liquid Web. At the time, Rackspace had noted that the Liquid Web business was not core to Rackspace’s business, which is also what has happened with Mailgun.

Rackspace continues to be focused on the cloud, though not just its own OpenStack powered cloud. The company has expanded to provide support to other clouds including Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EnterpriseAppsToday and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.

Sean Michael
Sean Michael

Sean Michael is a writer who focuses on innovation and how science and technology intersect with industry, technology Wordpress, VMware Salesforce, And Application tech. TechCrunch Europas shortlisted her for the best tech journalist award. She enjoys finding stories that open people's eyes. She graduated from the University of California.

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