Eastend has led a US$500,000 seed round in Nitrosend, an AI-native email marketing platform founded by Adelaide brothers Edward and George Hartley. Archangel Ventures (Melbourne) and Aussie Angels (Sydney) joined the round.
It's the second email marketing company the Hartleys have built together. Their first, SmartrMail, became one of the highest-rated marketing automation tools on Shopify, scaled to six billion emails sent, and was acquired by Relay Commerce in 2022. With Nitrosend, they're taking what they learned about what online businesses actually need from a marketing platform and rebuilding it from the ground up, with AI doing the work marketers used to spend their days on.
Email, inverted
Legacy email platforms were built for human operators: log in, drag blocks around a template, write the copy, read the dashboards. Nitrosend flips that. A business owner describes what they want a campaign to do, and the platform writes it, designs it, sends it, and reports back on what worked. The same applies to the rest of the grind, including welcome sequences, abandoned-cart workflows and customer segmentation, work that traditionally needed either a dedicated marketer or an expensive agency.
Crucially, all of it can be run straight from Claude or ChatGPT, or from the Nitrosend platform directly. The product is built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open standard introduced by Anthropic in late 2024 that lets AI agents control software directly. Every feature is accessible to an agent before it ever ships to a screen.
The target customer is the small and mid-sized business that drives most of the online economy, the segment most likely to be priced out of doing email marketing well.
Between us we've built two email platforms, sent over six billion emails, and scaled three technology companies. We've been on both sides of the email stack. This is a tool we initially started for ourselves. We needed this, and it turns out other people wanted it too.
That's George Hartley, co-founder of Nitrosend. The Hartleys have brought the SmartrMail band back together: Kam Low, SmartrMail's former Chief Technology Officer, has joined as a founding team member, with further hires planned over the coming months.
Early signals are encouraging. Since opening a pre-launch beta in April, Nitrosend has drawn 190 early users, with email volume roughly doubling every week.
Why Eastend backed it
Eastend's thesis is to back experienced founders in South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland building B2B software with hyper-growth potential. Nitrosend fits squarely: an Adelaide-born company going after a global market with a team that has already proven it can win in that exact category.
This isn't their first rodeo. They've built and sold a successful email marketing business before, and now they're back to do it again for an AI-world. Experienced founders going after a market they already understand better than anyone, at exactly the moment that market is being reshaped by AI. That's the kind of investment Eastend was built to make.
So says Josh Garratt, Founding Partner at Eastend Ventures.
You can start a free trial at nitrosend.com and experience the future of email marketing.