Company Profile
San Francisco, CA
Hustle
The texting platform that scales conversations, not spam - built for campaigns, nonprofits, unions and universities who need people to actually reply.
The texting platform that scales conversations, not spam - built for campaigns, nonprofits, unions and universities who need people to actually reply.
Hustle is a text and mobile messaging platform that lets an organization reach its audience through SMS, a voice dialer and short-form video - all from one screen. The pitch is simple: people ignore email, but they read their texts. Text marketing, the company notes, reaches roughly 98% open rates.
What separates Hustle from the flood of blast-SMS tools is a deliberate design choice. On its peer-to-peer product, a real agent presses send on each message from a dashboard. That makes it slower than a robotexter. It also means recipients can reply, a conversation can start, and the organization stays clear of the autodialer restrictions in the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. The "inefficiency" is the point.
"Engage your audience through text, calls, and video messages - all from one platform."
Founded in San Francisco in 2014 by Roddy Lindsay, a former Facebook data scientist, alongside Perry Rosenstein and Tyler Brock, Hustle grew up inside the world of political organizing and then spread to the places that live and die by turnout: nonprofits chasing donations, universities filling classrooms, unions rallying members.
Organizations that depend on action - a vote, a donation, an RSVP, a picket line - face the same wall: email goes unread and phone calls go unanswered, while blast texts get flagged as spam and legally boxed in. Hustle's answer is a texting workflow that feels personal enough to earn a reply but organized enough to run at scale. In one Oklahoma campaign, 95% of event attendees said a Hustle text was the reason they showed up.
The customer base spans four worlds - politics, nonprofits, higher education and labor - plus commercial businesses. It has been used by campaigns since 2015 (Hillary Clinton's team tested it that year; Bernie Sanders's volunteers made it famous in 2016) and by more than 30 universities for advancement and enrollment.
Whether a specific figure holds for any given audience is beside the point. The gap is the story: texts get seen, and getting seen is the whole battle for an organizer with a deadline.
Agents send personalized one-to-one messages from a dashboard, pressing send each time. Recipients can reply, so outreach turns into a two-way conversation instead of a broadcast.
Send thousands - even millions - of SMS/MMS messages simultaneously, with automated custom responses to handle replies at volume.
Run phone outreach from the same platform as texting, so calling and messaging live in one workflow rather than two disconnected tools.
Embed short-form video - Hustle Clips, Personalized Clips and Hustle Stories - directly inside a text, up to 30 seconds, with no app download required.
The messaging landscape has three layers. At the bottom sits raw infrastructure like Twilio, which moves messages but doesn't organize campaigns. At the top sit blast-SMS marketing tools built for coupons and order updates. Hustle lives in the middle: purpose-built for organizations that need conversations, not just deliveries.
Its closest rivals are the tools of the civic-tech and organizing world - GetThru (ThruText), Scale to Win, Spoke, RumbleUp and TextUs among them. Against those, Hustle's edge has been breadth (P2P, broadcast, dialer and video under one roof) and a decade of campaign scars. Against generic SMS platforms, its edge is compliance-by-design and a genuine reply flow.
Build long-term relationships and convert talk into action.
Engage your audience through text, calls, and video messages - all from one platform.
Build long-term relationships and convert talk into action.
Text message marketing achieves 98% open rates.
Hustle sells B2B SaaS subscriptions, generally priced by seats/agents and message volume, with enterprise plans for large campaigns, universities, nonprofits and unions. Its own stack - Salesforce, Pardot, Zendesk, Greenhouse, React - reads like a textbook modern software company.
| Round | Amount | When | Notable investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | ~$3M | 2015-16 | Canvas Ventures, Social Capital |
| Series A | $8M | Aug 2017 | Social Capital, Omidyar Network, Twilio.org, Index, Matrix |
| Later financing (reported) | ~$30M total by 2018 | 2018 | GV (Google Ventures), Salesforce Ventures, Insight Partners |
| Acquisition | - | Aug 2020 | Acquired by Social Capital |
| Employee buyout | - | Apr 2026 | Purchased by Hustle employees - now employee-owned |
Figures are drawn from public reporting and may be approximate; totals vary by source.
Roddy Lindsay, Perry Rosenstein and Tyler Brock start Hustle in San Francisco.
Hillary Clinton's team tests the platform as organizers experiment with P2P texting.
Around 1,200 volunteers send 10M+ messages, putting Hustle on the map.
Round led by Social Capital; partnership with Michelle Obama's Better Make Room.
Reported to have raised ~$30M as it expands into nonprofits, unions and higher ed.
Hustle is folded into Social Capital's portfolio.
Acquires Tape's technology and launches conversational video inside texts.
In April, Hustle's employees buy the company - independent and employee-owned.
Requiring a human on every P2P message isn't a bug - it's the legal and product moat that keeps Hustle clear of autodialer rules.
Co-founder Roddy Lindsay was an early Facebook data scientist before he built a texting company.
Clinton's team tested it in 2015, but Bernie Sanders's volunteers are the ones who put it on the map in 2016.
Independent startup, then a 2020 Social Capital acquisition, then a 2026 employee buyout. The ownership went round-trip.
A texting company that runs on Salesforce, Pardot, Zendesk, Greenhouse and React - very SaaS for a tool about human conversation.