Palo Alto – August 31, 2020 – Woodside Capital Partners is proud to announce that Hustle, a startup backed by Insight Venture Partners, Google’s GV and Salesforce Ventures, has been acquired by Social Capital, a tech holding company founded by Chamath Palihapitiya that supports innovative companies in healthcare, artificial intelligence, climate change and space. WCP served as exclusive financial advisor to Hustle for the transaction.
Hustle offers peer-to-peer text communication tools that create human connections between organizations and their contacts. Hustle’s TCPA compliant platform enables two-way conversations that develop connections over text messaging, eliminating barriers and igniting support for advocacy groups, fundraising, admissions and recruiting. This year, Hustle sent out more than 1 billion text messages. The company’s revenue run rate exceeds $10 million, and it’s profitable.
Hustle CEO Steven Pease says, “Over four years ago, Chamath had the confidence to be one of the first investors in Hustle and we are humbled by his conviction in our platform…Our founding vision was a world where organisations are stronger because they can meaningfully connect with people. In today’s climate, Hustle is poised to play an increased role in the communities and networks we support, and engagement on our platform has never been greater.”
Chamath Palihapitiya is a Canadian-American venture capitalist and the founder and CEO of Social Capital. Palihapitiya was an early senior executive at Facebook. Following investments in Palantir, Pure Storage (PSTG), Playdom (bought by The Walt Disney Company), and Bumptop (bought by Google), Palihapitiya’s net worth by the age of 34 was USD1 billion. He said: “Hustle is uniquely positioned to rethink the way we engage with organisations and companies across the globe. As a scalable mobile platform that leverages machine learning to process billions of interactions at a time, Hustle can refine these critical interactions and foster greater connectivity between community-based organisations, non-profits, corporations and the people they serve.“
In its acquisition of Hustle, Social Capital shares in the vision of using text messaging for businesses to communicate with their users in a more personalized way, creating better connections and higher conversion rates.
Hustle will continue to be led by CEO Steven Pease along with the existing management team. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
The WCP team led by Managing Partner, Tricia Salinero and Managing Director, Ron Heller handled negotiations and helped close the deal.
About Hustle
The trusted leader in peer-to-peer text messaging, powering authentic conversations at scale. We work to expand the scope and effectiveness of outreach and connect with a younger demographic in the way that they prefer to communicate: through text. Texting with Hustle is 77x faster than phone banking and results in 40x more engagement than email. Hustle’s platform provides a range of possible workflows to help anyone in your organization exceed goals and build more meaningful relationships.
For more information, visit https://www.hustle.com/
About Social Capital
At Social Capital, our mission is to advance humanity by solving the world’s hardest problems. We believe that empowering entrepreneurs who seek to improve the lives of the people around them is the best way to create more opportunity globally. At its core, Social Capital is an organization that identifies hard problems and assembles experts, IP and experiments that allow us to learn about these problems deeply. Once we have conviction about a solution, we will then execute — by building, buying, or investing in whatever it takes to solve the problem we identified.
For more information, visit https://www.socialcapital.com/
Questions? Contact Katie Elizabeth, Head of Marketing, Woodside Capital Partners at [email protected]
Woodside Capital Partners is the leading corporate finance advisors for tech companies in M&A and financings in the $30M-$500M segment. The firm has worked with the best entrepreneurs and investors since 2001, providing ultra-personalized service to our select clients. Our team has global vision and reach, and has completed hundreds of successful engagements from straightforward to very complex. All of our Partners, Managing Directors and Executive Directors are sector experts with decades of experience. We provide deep industry knowledge and extensive domain experience in the following sectors: Autonomous Vehicles and ADAS, Computer Vision, Artificial Intelligence, Cloud/Enterprise Software, Cybersecurity, Digital Entertainment & Lifestyle, Health Tech, Internet of Things, Marketing Technology, Networking / Infrastructure, and Robotics. Woodside Capital Partners is a specialist in cross-border transactions, with extensive relationships among venture capitalists, investors, and corporate executives from global 1000 companies.