Brevo, a provider of CRM and marketing automation based in Paris that was formerly known as Sendinblue, raised a €500 million ($583 million) round of new equity to join the crowded world of companies with unicorn valuations while also further challenging established players such as Salesforce and HubSpot. The raise will support Brevo’s accelerated U.S. expansion, further develop its AI capabilities, and help fuel aggressive acquisition plans as it expands beyond its roots in the SMB (small/medium business) space into the mid-market.
Funding, valuation, and the investors behind Brevo’s round
The company declined to specify its valuation, but said it has now surpassed $1 billion. Joining the cap table are new investors General Atlantic and Oakley Capital, while management and employees are now the biggest bloc at 26%. Previous backers Bpifrance and Bridgepoint maintain a decent stake, while early investor Partech has completely exited. Brevo says it holds a double-digit EBITDA margin and has previously supplemented equity with borrowing when financing its growth.
The new funding will back a U.S. expansion in excess of €100 million along with an existing commitment to invest €50 million into AI over five years, the company said in a statement. The war chest is also funding ongoing M&A and, per Brevo’s strategy to scale faster than organic growth offers, it is using the deal-making lever as a core element of its own growth-scaling plan.
From email upstart to integrated customer platform
Founded in 2012, Brevo started as an email marketing service for small businesses and has blossomed into an all-in-one customer platform. Today, the company provides CRM, marketing automation, a customer data layer, and multi-channel communications covering email, SMS, WhatsApp, push notifications, live chat, and integrated sales calls. That breadth pits it directly against Mailchimp (owned by Intuit) on messaging and with HubSpot for integrated CRM and marketing automation.
The company claims over 600,000 customers worldwide, with a customer base occupying territory somewhere between SMBs and household names such as Carrefour, eBay, and H&M. Brevo itself has circa 1,000 people or so and recently reshaped itself as a mid-market scrappy upstart that puts usability and value at the fore but filters in more enterprise-grade capabilities.
Pursuing share in a pared CRM market dominated by giants
Analysts at Gartner have long called CRM the biggest of all enterprise software categories, a sector led by Salesforce and accompanied by giants such as Microsoft and HubSpot. Salesforce alone is aiming for $41.55 billion in revenue by 2026, emphasizing the scale gap Brevo will have to close to directly compete in North America.
Brevo’s U.S. business now makes up about 15% of its revenue, along with France and Germany as its three largest markets. “Winning share here in the States will be predicated on a tightly integrated product experience, clear and transparent pricing, and faster time to value — all things that have been influencing mid-market buyers who balance sophistication with use.”
AI and M&A as primary growth locomotives for Brevo
Brevo has made 11 acquisitions so far, and it uses deals to add features, enter new geographies, and consolidate in crowded parts of the market. Management anticipates that M&A will represent 45% of the €1 billion revenue target announced for 2030, making clear that roll-ups are to continue playing a starring role in its playbook. The fresh money prepares the company to attack new targets, bigger markets in customer engagement, data, and workflow automation.
On the product front, Brevo is baking in AI across content creation, send-time optimization, segmentation, lead scoring, and conversational experiences. The business leverages a combination of in-house models and third-party integrations to accelerate campaign production and bring customer data insights to the surface. Instead, embedded functionality can help to simplify for those mid-market teams that don’t often have a robust data science capability in-house (that they typically won’t have needed at scale).
Execution challenges and what to watch as Brevo expands
To break through in the United States will take more than capital. The challenges for Brevo are to establish local brand recognition, deepen a partner ecosystem, and demonstrate its ability to scale support and implementation without jeopardizing the reputation it has already gained for ease of use. Channel costs — in the case of SMS and WhatsApp, especially — also require disciplined unit economics as message volumes go up.
Data privacy and security will continue to take center stage. Brevo’s European lineage and GDPR know-how may be a plus to compliance-wary buyers, but U.S.-headquartered customers will demand robust certifications, open data handling, and tight integrations across an already-sprawling martech stack.
Still, the opportunity is clear. Buyers are in the process of consolidating tools, AI has changed marketing and sales workflows, and mid-market companies need platforms that are powerful but accessible. With new cash in hand, a broader suite of products, and an expanding customer base, Brevo has the resources — and expectations — it needs to make a credible run at the CRM incumbents.
