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Email management and delivery service SendGrid has replaced CEO Jim Franklin. Sameer Dholakia, former group vice president and general manager of the Cloud Platforms Group at Citrix, will become the new CEO immediately. Former CEO Franklin had led SendGrid since 2011.
The move is a step by SendGrid to prepare for an IPO.
"Jim Franklin has been instrumental in the growth and success of SendGrid over the last few years. Under his leadership, SendGrid has evolved from a startup with 20 employees and several thousand customers to where we are today – an industry leader in email delivery with over 250 employees and over 175,000 customers," said Isaac Saldana, founder and president of SendGrid, in a statement. "We're excited to bring in Sameer to build on this strong foundation and lead the next phase of our growth."
SendGrid has built itself into an email infrastructure juggernaut. The company sends over 13 billion emails per month and claims to move over three percent of the worlds non-spam email. That kind of volume and the company’s growth has landed SendGrid on the Inc. 5000 list and put the company on a path for an IPO.
[ibimage==30118==Large==none==self==ibimage_align-center]SendGrid's trajectory in the past several years has been sharply upward
It is fairly typical for startups to change CEO’s as they prepare for a possible public offering. Even monstrous Google decided prior to its IPO that it was best to install Eric Schmidt, an executive with prior experience working at and running software companies Sun Microsystems and Novell. That appears to be the strategy of SendGrid’s board of directors in appointing Dholakia.
"Sameer brings the ideal combination of expertise in successfully growing a young company, and in delivering unparalleled value to small, mid-size and enterprise customers through product innovation. His leadership will accelerate the expansion of SendGrid,” said Saldana.
SendGrid was founded in 2009, is headquartered in Boulder and has offices in Denver as well. The company participated in the Techstars program and had raised $26.4 million in funding.
