Textexpander, Which Lets Users Build Shortcuts To Speed Up Business Communications, Raises $41.4M, Its First-Ever Funding

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Today, a company called TextExpander — which has has identified and built a way to fix a similar gap in another repetitive aspect of business life, communications, by letting users create customized shortcuts to trigger longer text-based actions such as specific phrasing around a topic, calendar events, emails, messages, CRM systems and many other environments — is announcing $41.4 million in funding to expand something else: its business. Alongside the funding, the company is also appointing a new CEO, J.D. Mullin, who is taking over from Philip Goward, who co-founded the company originally with Greg Scown. As a bootstrapped (and profitable) startup, TextExpander today has some 100,000 monthly active users, with in the last year some 560 million “expansions” have been carried out using its platform — essentially, text snippets or keyboard shortcuts created by organizations or individuals to trigger longer text passages, useful when companies, say, want to keep messaging consistent; or (eg, in sales or customer service) when they want people to use wording that has been successful in the past, or simply to speed up work for a person going through a repetitive process. The first of these is automation, where we have seen a wide array of tools — some based around the functionality afforded by machine learning and artificial intelligence; some simply built around more sophisticated scripts and API usage to improve interactivity and information exchange between different databases and applications; some a combination of both of these — created and implemented to help humans do their very digital and information-heavy jobs more quickly, especially in cases where they repeating similar work.The other is the rise of low- and no-code tools, ways of helping to empower workers to build solutions to their own software challenges in certain situations rather than rely on developers or other technical people to have the resources and ability to solve those problems for them.TextExpander is operating in a realm where both of these are at play: its platform was originally designed for non-technical individuals to be able to create their own shortcuts and hacks, and later as it expanded to building a way for teams to access shortcut repositories, it kept a lot of its non-technical ethos.