Lob

Overview

Lob is a direct-mail API company based in San Francisco that lets businesses send postcards, letters and checks programmatically, instead of negotiating with printers and stuffing envelopes by hand (TechCrunch). Founded in 2013 by Harry Zhang and Leore Avidar through Y Combinator’s summer program, it grew from a two-founder developer tool into a platform used by more than 8,500 companies and funded with $80 million by early 2021 (TechCrunch; TechCrunch).

This profile covers Lob, the direct-mail API company at lob.com — not any other business using the name — and follows it from a mailroom frustration to a funded platform, a certified address-verification business, and a no-code tool for marketers.

From a mailroom problem to a developer API

Lob was founded just a couple of months before its July 2013 public debut by University of Michigan graduates Harry Zhang and Leore Avidar, and it entered Y Combinator’s summer 2013 program (TechCrunch). The idea came directly from Zhang’s previous job as a product manager at Microsoft, where a campaign requiring customized mailings for many different customers stalled at the print-and-mail stage, leaving interns stuffing envelopes in a mailroom for weeks (TechCrunch). Avidar, who had worked at Citigroup and then at Amazon Web Services, described the pitch as taking the AWS model — programmable infrastructure, bought on demand — and applying it to a different industry (TechCrunch).

The early product was deliberately a tool for developers, not a consumer service: a RESTful API through which a business could send one-off print jobs or buy in bulk, covering business cards, photos, posters, letters, postcards, checks and stickers (TechCrunch). Its target uses were practical rather than glamorous — fulfillment for businesses that did not want to hold inventory, bills and statements in finance and real estate, new-hire packets in human resources, and physical checks from payroll services (TechCrunch). Early customers included CrowdTilt, ZenPayroll and LendUp, and the Sunnyvale-based startup began with just its two founders as full-time employees (TechCrunch).

That model found paying customers fast. In November 2013 Lob announced a $2.4 million seed round from Y Combinator partners and angel investors including Sam Altman, Alexis Ohanian, Paul Buchheit and Garry Tan, alongside Polaris Partners (TechCrunch). By then it reported more than 1,000 paying customers, $40,000 in revenue in the previous month, and $1 million worth of checks printed, with two Fortune 500 companies testing the service (TechCrunch). Its pricing edge, as Avidar framed it, was not being the cheapest option but being variable: customers paid as they went and could order a minimum quantity of one, where competitors traditionally demanded large upfront or prepaid orders (TechCrunch).

Address verification: the quiet second product

Printing was only half of Lob’s business, and the less visible half may have mattered more. From launch, its API offered address verification — free for United States addresses and $0.15 per international address — alongside “Smart Packaging,” which picked packaging automatically, and routing that sent each job to the nearest printer in its network (TechCrunch). That network was itself a product decision: rather than ordinary print shops, Lob standardized printers with custom integrations into their systems and workflows (TechCrunch).

Address verification became a standalone product in 2017, when Lob announced a $20 million round led by Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund, with former Twitter chief operating officer Ali Rowghani joining its board (VentureBeat). The new API gave customers access to more than 156 million domestic addresses to avoid improperly addressed mailings, and — crucially — it was CASS-certified by the United States Postal Service, which meant users could qualify for automation and presorted discount postage rates (VentureBeat). In other words, verification was not just data hygiene; it changed the postage economics of every piece Lob sent. By then the San Francisco-based company had 45 employees, had raised $29.4 million in total, and said it had sent mail to one in nine United States households (VentureBeat). Its mail went primarily through USPS, with FedEx or UPS used occasionally for overnight delivery, and its print delivery network routed each piece to the closest postal facility, with tracking analytics returned to the customer (VentureBeat).

Funding, scale and the move to marketers

By February 2021 Lob’s story had shifted from developer tool to enterprise platform. It raised a $50 million Series C led by Y Combinator Continuity, bringing total funding to $80 million, and reported more than 8,500 customers including Twitter, Expedia and Booking.com (TechCrunch). The company estimated its platform had been used to deliver mail to one in two United States households, and planned to triple the amount of mail it delivered that year while growing headcount past 260 (TechCrunch).

Avidar drew a useful distinction that explains why the business survived the supposed death of paper mail: Lob served two kinds of mail, not one (TechCrunch). The first was mail sent for a regulatory or compliance purpose — mail businesses are legally required to send in printed form — which does not disappear when email gets cheaper (TechCrunch). The second was direct mail as marketing, which companies were rediscovering precisely because social advertising and search ads had grown expensive and email was easy to unsubscribe from (TechCrunch). Lob claimed it cut campaign execution time by 95%, from 90 days to less than a day, and other companies such as PostPilot and Postalytics were building on top of its platform (TechCrunch).

The platform then moved closer to the marketer. In April 2021 its service became available on Salesforce’s AppExchange through a partnership with developer Veezla, so Salesforce users could send personalized letters, postcards and checks at scale without leaving the CRM, with reporting and response metrics inside the Salesforce interface (SiliconANGLE). Mailings could be triggered by time or by interactions logged in Salesforce — a satisfaction survey 30 days after a sale, for example — and Lob specialized in postcards, self-mailers and letters rather than packages or catalogs, with creative built in HTML and personalized down to the individual recipient (SiliconANGLE). In May 2022 Lob launched a no-code Direct Mail Automation Platform aimed squarely at marketers, managing the process end to end from concept to print, delivery and campaign optimization, with scheduled, ad-hoc or triggered campaigns, no scale or frequency minimums, a zero-touch print-and-delivery priority network, and address-verification quality controls to stop bad mail reaching printers (DestinationCRM).

Avidar, meanwhile, went on to found a second company in a very different market: Alt, the alternative-asset platform for trading cards that launched publicly in March 2021 with Avidar as its chief executive (TechCrunch).

What this profile does not claim

• Lob’s headquarters history is stated with a caveat: 2013 coverage calls it Sunnyvale-based, while 2017 and later coverage calls it San Francisco-based. No source read states when or why the base moved, so no move date is claimed.
• The funding total is also caveated: TechCrunch reported $80 million in February 2021, while SiliconANGLE reported more than $83 million two months later. No source read explains the increase, so the profile reports both figures with their dates rather than merging them.
• Growth figures such as the one-in-two households estimate, the 95% execution-time reduction and the one-in-nine households claim are company-reported numbers carried by independent outlets, not independently audited results.
• Lob’s status after its May 2022 platform launch — including later leadership, headcount, funding and product changes — was not verified from fully-read independent sources and is deliberately not stated.
• Aggregator estimates of revenue, valuation and total funding were not used: they disagree across aggregators and are estimates rather than editorial reporting.