Local tech startup Sigstr sold to Atlanta-based marketing tech firm

Fast-growing local tech startup Sigstr Inc. has been acquired by Atlanta-based marketing technology firm Terminus Software Inc., officials for both companies announced Tuesday.

Financial terms of the deal, which closed this week, were not disclosed.

Sigstr, which sells software that enables companies to leverage employee emails for marketing purposes, is expected to maintain—and grow—its Indianapolis presence under the Terminus name, company officials said.

The four-year-old company has 60 employees at its downtown office, and all of those employees are slated to stay with the operation. CEO Bryan Wade, a former executive for ExactTarget and Salesforce who joined Sigstr in early 2017, will join the executive team at Terminus.

“Combining our solution with the Terminus platform activates an untapped channel that changes how businesses engage with target accounts,” Wade said in written comments. “We’re long-standing partners from both a technology and go-to-market perspective, making this combination a no-brainer and massive opportunity for our combined customers, and account-centric businesses everywhere looking to sharpen how they engage across the entire customer lifecycle.”

Dan Hanrahan, a former ExactTarget employee, began working on Sigstr in the summer of 2014. A year later, local venture studio High Alpha announced that it was adopting Sigstr as a portfolio company, a designation that came with a $500,000 investment and in-house expertise with everything from pricing to hiring.

“I couldn’t be more excited about bringing two powerhouse teams together to shape the future of B2B marketing,” said Scott Dorsey, ExactTarget co-founder and former CEO who is now High Alpha managing partner. “Category leaders are built around great teams and innovative products. This team has exactly what it takes.”

Earlier this month, Terminus announced that well-known Indianapolis venture capitalist and marketing technology veteran Tim Kopp was stepping in as CEO and executive chairman of the company, one of Hyde Park Venture Partners’ portfolio companies. Kopp, a former ExactTarget chief marketing officer, remains a general partner at Hyde Park Venture Partners and oversees the Indianapolis office.

In addition to the $500,000 it secured from High Alpha, Sigstr scored $1.5 million in capital in 2015, $4 million in 2017 and another $5 million in 2018.

Over the years, Sigstr signed deals with a number of high-profile clients, including AT&T, Amazon and United Way.

In June 2016, Sigstr announced plans to add 111 new jobs to a baseline of 15 by the end of 2020 in exchange for $1 million in state tax credits from the Indiana Economic Development Corp.

In August 2018, Sigstr released its latest software application, Pulse, which company officials said would give the company a big boost.

Sigstr’s software allows messages—often incorporated into the email signature line—to be customized based on a number of factors, including who within the company is sending the email and who is receiving it. Pulse is geared more toward sales and marketing.

In addition to allowing custom email messages across all—or subsets of—employees within a company or organization, Pulse tracks when an email is opened, tracks how fast it generates a response, how many messages are sent back and forth between parties, the number of calendar invites generated between parties emailing and other factors to determine relationship strength.

The software rate the relationship between the sender and recipient, thus allowing companies to do more effective marketing.