Who to contact at a company that just raised

You've found a company with a new round, a good fit and a clear reason to write. Now the question that kills more outbound than bad copy: who do you actually email?

Get this wrong and a great email lands with someone who can't say yes, and has no reason to forward it.

Start with company size

Size changes who holds the budget and who feels the problem.

• A handful of people. The founder or CEO almost always owns the decision, and often reads their own email. Write to them.
• A few dozen people. Decisions are shared. The founder still matters, but the person who runs the relevant function (sales, engineering, marketing, operations) is usually the better first email.
• Bigger teams. Go to the owner of the area you affect. The CEO is rarely the right door, and cold emails to them tend to get forwarded down with no context.

These are rules of thumb, not laws. If the company site tells you who runs what, believe the site.

Then choose the contact by what you sell

Ask one question: who feels the pain you fix?

• Selling to sales teams: head of sales, or the founder if there isn't one yet.
• Selling to engineering: CTO, head of engineering, or the technical founder.
• Selling to finance or operations: whoever runs it, often a COO or finance lead at small companies.
• Selling to hiring teams: the person named on the job ad, or the founder at very small companies.

If a job ad is part of why you're writing, the hiring manager's name is often on the ad or the company's team page.

Where to find names

All of this is public information:

• The company's team or about page
• Job ads, which often name the team or hiring manager
• The funding announcement, which usually quotes a founder or executive
• Professional profiles that people have chosen to make public
• For UK companies, Companies House lists officers and directors

Check that the person still works there. A team page that hasn't been updated in two years is a trap.

Work emails

Once you have a name and a company, you need an address. Use the company's own contact page if it lists one. Otherwise addresses usually follow a pattern, but guessing is how you bounce a lot of emails and damage your sending reputation. If you can't confirm an address, a reply to a public post or a short note through the company's contact form is better than a guess.

Send each person one email, not five. Emailing three people at the same company on the same day with the same message looks like spam, because it is.

One contact or several?

Start with one. If you get silence after a couple of attempts, you can try a second person in a different role, with a different message that acknowledges the context. Don't copy the first email.

Respect the opt-out

For business-to-business email in the UK, you should identify yourself, say why you're writing, and give a clear way to opt out. Honour requests quickly. If someone says no, that's the end of it. (This is general good practice, not legal advice.)

How Outrun handles the "who"

We do the boring research so you don't have to. Leads come with named contacts and a work email where we can find one, plus job titles and LinkedIn profiles where we have them.

You still decide who to write to and what to say. That's the human bit.

A quick routine

1. Read the announcement and note who's quoted.
2. Decide which function you affect and who runs it.
3. Find that person's name and current role.
4. Write one email with one reason and one question.
5. Wait a few days before following up.

Get leads with named contacts at 7am every weekday: start your 7-day free trial (card required).

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