We build technology to help brands send a better message.

Cordial team members at summer party 2022

Why Cordial?

We chose the name Cordial for a number of reasons. Cordial was first inspired by a popular children’s movie where the nanny magically creates three personalized flavors of medicine from the same bottle—strawberry, lime cordial, and rum punch. But we quickly realized this would become the pillar for our culture, too. Our team operates with a degree of kindness, authenticity, respect, and accountability that you’d learn to expect from a company called Cordial.

We’re just getting started

We founded Cordial on the belief that there should be more humanity and empathy in marketing—both in how brands communicate with their customers and in how technology companies work with brands. We built our company and platform purposefully, driven by a desire to inspire more thoughtful communication—for consumers, for the people at the companies we work with, and for Cordial employees.

2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022

Rum punch, or lime cordial?

November

Our founders set out to build Cordial to be both marketer-friendly and technologically future-proof.

We hired our first employee, Daniel Smith, as “employee #1”. Daniel set out to build the best multi-tenant SaaS architecture in any space—one that efficiently shares resources and gives our clients the most performance possible.

First clients, first emails

March

Daily Insight Group signs agreement to partner with us to send personalized emails, and continues to partner with us to this day.

Our first clients send the first commercial email messages, officially launching Cordial Email.

It’s time to fly

October

Our founding team graduated from R/GA’s Connected Commerce Accelerator. We had the opportunity to partner with and learn from global leaders in the commerce space, and were given access to the team at Westfield Labs—one of the leading experts in the convergence of digital shopping and physical retail.

Fuel for growth

February

We raised $6M in Series A funding, led by Upfront Ventures. High Alpha also participated in the round.

August

Our international product & engineering team met up in Lisbon, Portugal for a week-long hackathon as part of our first-ever Dev Summit. Over the years, our Dev summit will take us to Gran Canaria and Bali, too!

Ready for blast-off

June

We raised $15M in Series B funding, led by Peakspan. Upfront Ventures and High Alpha also participated in the round.

July

We won 1st place for small businesses and was named one of San Diego’s Best Places to Work.

Conferences and communities

March

We held our first client conference, Bespoke 19, in sunny San Diego. Clients and future clients joined us for networking, learning, and product sneak peeks over two days. Who can forget the branded coconuts?

April

We created our philanthropy program, Cordial Cares, to ensure we are as cordial to our communities in need as we are to one another.

See you on Zoom

March

The wrap-up of our annual TKO (team kick-off) was met by COVID-19 and a pivot to working from home. Our team gracefully navigated through the early stages of the pandemic and made time for holiday celebrations, like St. Patrick’s Day!

May

We were named a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave: Email Marketing Service Providers, Q2 2020 report.

We're building something different

May

The Cordial team grew nearly 50% in 2021 and starting in May, we expanded our executive team by adding industry veterans with impressive track records growing and scaling both start up and enterprise organizations.

December

More growth! Our dedication to our clients’ success allowed us to achieve YoY email growth of 51%, SMS/MMS growth of 434%, and mobile app growth of 466%.