Mailchimp

Mailchimp was launched in 2001. The platform was named after one of their most popular e-greeting card characters, earning a few thousand dollars monthly. Mailchimp began as a paid service and added a freemium option in 2009. Within a year, its user base had grown from 85,000 to 450,000. By June 2014, it was sending over 10 billion emails per month on behalf of its users. As of 2020 more than 600 million emails are sent through the platform every two days.

In August 2017, it was reported that Mailchimp would be opening offices in Brooklyn and Oakland, California.

In February 2019, Mailchimp acquired LemonStand, a smaller competitor. Mailchimp later announced its plans to shift from mail distribution to offering a full marketing platform aimed at smaller organizations. This shift includes allowing customers to record and track customer leads within the platform, build landing pages and websites, and run ad retargeting advertisements on Facebook and Instagram. As part of this, Mailchimp acquired the London-based media and magazine company Courier Media in March 2020, with the stated goal of international growth. The magazine has a readership of 100,000 readers in more than 26 countries.

With founders Armstrong and Chestnut starting the company without outside funding or plans to go public, and never bringing on any outside investors thereafter, Mailchimp is considered an example of a successfully bootstrapped startup.

Acquisition by Intuit

After turning down repeated acquisition offers for 20 years, Bloomberg reported on August 31, 2021, that Mailchimp was talking with Intuit about being acquired. On September 13, 2021, Intuit confirmed it would acquire Mailchimp for approximately $12 billion in cash and stock. On November 1, 2021, Intuit officially completed the acquisition for $5.7bn in cash, $6.3bn in common stock, and 573,000 restricted stock units. At the time of the acquisition, Mailchimp had more than 13 million users globally, including approximately 2.4 million monthly active users.

After the acquisition, Intuit changed the name of the platform to Intuit Mailchimp. Following the acquisition, Intuit also integrated Mailchimp with its small business platform, including products such as QuickBooks and TurboTax, as part of a broader strategy to expand marketing automation and customer data capabilities for small businesses.

As a podcast advertiser, Mailchimp sponsored the launch of Serial, a podcast exploring a murder case over multiple episodes.

Another ad became memorable for its inclusion of an unscripted mispronunciation of the company's name – "MailKimp" – as spoken by a 14-year-old girl from Norway waiting in line for an iPhone 6. The ad was parodied and "MailKimp" became a meme. In response, Mailchimp bought the domain name mailkimp.com and redirected traffic to mailchimp.com.

In 2018, Mailchimp underwent a brand redesign to help visually demonstrate an evolution from an email marketing tool to a larger marketing platform. This redesign included an updated logo, color palette, typeface, new imagery, and illustrations. It updated the Mailchimp wordmark to "Mailchimp" rather than "MailChimp" with an uppercase letter "C".