Earth Class Mail snags $5.1 million investment

Amid stories of layoffs and funding troubles for so many start-ups across the country, Seattle's Earth Class Mail just secured $5.1 million in new capital from over four dozen angel investors. Earth Class Corp delivers postal mail over the Internet by manually scanning in each piece and sending it to a digital PO box. Users can therefore check their postal mail from anywhere in the world. The company has increased staff by 35% over the past two quarters, and has opened several new processing centers to meet increased demand from a growing customer base.

“We’ve been reeling from having too many prospective customers, including about 40 national posts, and only a handful of senior sales executives to respond,” said CEO Ron Wiener.

The company is benefitting from recent economic pressures, as large businesses and government offices clamor for "paperless" solutions designed to cut costs related to mail handling. Because offices using Earth Class Mail often choose to recycle up to 90% of their postal mail, the company is also benefitting from an increased demand for carbon footprint reduction.

Earth Class Mail is starting to shift into SaaS mode rather than just offering their traditional outsourced mail processing, which is also helping their bottom line. Many new accounts are opting to use Earth Class Mail's scalable web-hosted platform rather than getting Earth Class Mail to do all the mail-handling for them.

The company has raised $21.4 million since inception, and was featured on a reality television show called "Startup Junkies" in 2007.