Canalmail

About Canalmail

Canalmail, founded in June 2000 by Juan Imaz and Javier Cámara, established itself as a pioneering company in the email direct marketing sector across Spain, Portugal, and Mexico. Juan Imaz had prior entrepreneurial experience, having founded Mixmail, the first free Spanish web-based email service in 1996, which he sold to Ya.com three years later. Javier Cámara brought experience from his time at Oracle in Spain.

The company's business is centered on permission-based email marketing, offering direct marketing services to advertisers and marketers. Canalmail provides clients with turnkey solutions for managing complete email marketing campaigns, utilizing its proprietary technology and channel-specific expertise to optimize results. Its services offered key advantages such as high segmentation capacity, specialized software, and measurable cost-benefit analysis. The business model focused on leveraging its substantial database of unique users to provide advertisers with a highly targeted audience. At its peak, the company managed a database of over 50 million unique users and handled more than 7 million daily transactions.

A significant milestone occurred in 2008 when Veronis Suhler Stevenson (VSS), the majority investor in the digital advertising company Media Response Group, acquired a stake in Canalmail. Reports from that time indicate VSS acquired a 30% stake for €10.5 million, which valued the company at €42 million. By 2007, Canalmail had reached revenues of €11 million. The company operated as an investment of Talde Private Equity from 2000 to 2008. Following the exit, the founders, Imaz and Cámara, went on to build various professional and vertical job portals, which were eventually unified under the brand beBee in 2014.