Hustle Raises $8 Million to Disrupt Telemarketing
Hustle‘s plan to humanize campaign communications earned the startup $8 million in Series A financing through a funding round led by Palo Alto’s Social Capital.
The San Francisco startup’s platform manages real conversations through personalized, one-to-one text messaging. Hustle is the middle-man between slow, expensive telephone and door-to-door personal campaigning and the scalable yet highly impersonal email blasts.
CEO Robby Lindsay called the new funding “an important milestone” for a company whose app has already lead to conversations with 25 million people across the US, Canada and Australia.
“In the years ahead, we think that humanizing communication is something that all institutions and relationship-driven businesses should be doing with Hustle,” said Lindsay in a Medium post. “This funding will enable us to pursue our vision of a world where organizations of all kinds are meaningfully and personally connected to their communities.”
Launched in 2014, Hustle forged their business in the 2016 election cycle. The app was used during both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns. Lindsay said the app helped scale and humanize the way that hundreds of campaigns communicated with voters and supporters. Their data-driven approach also gives organizations analytics on donations and pledges earned through the app.
While it might sound like another way to spam people with a campaign’s call-to-action, Hustle is taking mass-texting to a grassroots level.
