Lob provides a direct-mail API and platform that lets businesses send physical mail programmatically with greater speed, personalization, and cost efficiency. The company says its platform has been used to deliver mail to one in two U.S. households and serves more than 8,500 customers, including Twitter, Expedia and Booking.com. Lob has built a network of printing and delivery partners (its Print Delivery Network) and powers other companies that build on top of its platform. It claims to cut direct mail campaign execution time by roughly 95%, from around 90 days to less than a day. Lob has increasingly focused on enterprise customers while continuing to offer products for small businesses. The company plans to triple the amount of physical mail delivered through its platform this year and expand the Print Delivery Network while growing headcount to more than 260 employees. Lob provides tools that let businesses upload documents (submitted as HTML) which Lob prints at a facility closest to the recipient, hands to the U.S. Postal Service, and tracks through delivery. The company recently launched an address verification service and completed a certification process with the U.S. Postal Service to gain access to address data. Lob says it has delivered mail to one in nine U.S. households to date. The product aims to reduce operational overhead by verifying addresses before printing and to support compliance-driven mail needs that vary by state. Lob plans to expand beyond core mail delivery and build a broader suite of products around physical addresses and getting goods to people in the real world. The company faces competitors such as Kite.ly (acquired by Canon) and acknowledges potential competition from larger logistics or retail players. Lob provides a developer API that enables companies to integrate printing and shipping services — postcards, photos, flyers, posters, bills, checks, and invoices — into their apps. The platform includes address verification and an automatic packaging selection feature. Founded in 2013 by Leore Avidar and Harry Zhang and Y Combinator‑backed, Lob claims more than 3,500 customers, including Intuit, Porch, and Ubiquiti Networks, with early adopters such as CrowdTilt, ZenPayroll, LendUp, and LocalOn. Lob raised a $7M Series A led by Polaris Partners after a $2.4M seed announced in November 2013. Proceeds will be used to build new APIs, expand into the UK and Australia, grow the team, and improve product functionality, including adding tracing and tracking features. As part of the round, Polaris partner Pat Kinsel will join Lob’s board of directors. Lob offers a developer API that automates printing and shipping of physical products such as postcards, photos, flyers, posters, bills, checks, invoices and more. The platform includes address verification and a “Smart Packaging” feature that selects optimal packaging automatically. Early adopters include CrowdTilt, ZenPayroll, LendUp and LocalOn, and the company reports over 1,000 paying customers. Lob hit $40,000 in revenue at the end of last month and has printed a million dollars worth of checks. Two Fortune 500 companies are testing the service on a smaller scale, which the founders say could convert into multi-million dollar deals. The startup plans to add new product categories (photo albums, t-shirts, mugs and potentially physical books), hire more engineers, and expand its team beyond the current four people.

Total raised

$79M

Funding rounds

4

Latest round

Series C

Latest activity

Feb 2021