BoldFish Secures $15 Million in Second-Round Financing.

Mayfield Fund and Alloy Ventures Contribute Second Round Financing to Back

Market Expansion for Leading Developer of Outbound Email Solutions

SANTA CLARA, Calif., May 15 /PRNewswire/ --

BoldFish, Inc., a pioneer developer of out-bound email solutions for enterprise marketing and customer services, today announced it has secured $15 million in its second round of venture capital financing from Mayfield Fund in Menlo Park and Alloy Ventures in Palo Alto. This Series B financing brings BoldFish's funding total to $18.3 million, and signals the confidence of the financial community in the company's rapid growth. A pre-IPO company, BoldFish will use this round of financing to build out its technology and continue its long-term strategy to dominate the high-volume, outbound email market. BoldFish will expand its market reach with aggressive marketing and sales programs over the next two quarters.

"The BoldFish market is exploding, as companies realize email is a business-critical customer communication tool, and will make or break market share by driving customer retention," said David Ladd, general partner of Mayfield Fund. "BoldFish technology enables rapid implementation of online marketing strategies, allowing companies to quickly expand customer reach and develop new business alliances to remain competitive. BoldFish has a critical market advantage, and is poised to do for email distribution, what Inktomi and Akamai have done for caching."

Since initial funding last August, the company has relocated to its current headquarters, more than doubled its staff and secured top-tier customers, such as Colgate-Palmolive and Stockpoint, and has established partnerships with BroadVision, Inc., Oracle Corp., Sun Microsystems and Red Hat, Inc.

"Market demand has quickly moved beyond a mail-merge solution for email marketing campaigns. Companies now view email distribution as a mission critical application for improving customer satisfaction and revenue generation," said Matt Cain, senior analyst with META Group. "Companies like BoldFish are on target to meet this demand with products that handle outbound email distribution and quickly integrate into a company's IT infrastructure."

BoldFish is the industry's first production-ready, high-volume message delivery system. The BoldFish technology provides seamless, back-end integration to enable a customer's existing database to integrate with email software to deliver high-volume and high-speed sending capabilities; reliable, time-critical mailings; complete content personalization; and efficient, effective management of bounced e-mail. Companies are recognizing that e-mail is a powerful way to provide critical information, increase brand awareness, and increase sales. Forrester Research estimates that the number of commercial e-mail messages will increase from a mere three billion today to 250 billion by the year 2002. BoldFish technology enables efficient management of high-volume mailings to maintain quality customer and investor relationships, and improve email marketing through personalized messaging.

"This is an exciting growth phase and we are prepared for aggressive expansion. We have geared up to meet the market demands for BoldFish and serve our growing base of customers and partners," said Barbara Tallent, president and CEO of BoldFish. "The funding from Mayfield and Alloy will be used to keep pace with market demands and let us capitalize on our rapid success. We are delighted with the enthusiastic support of these blue-chip firms, which signals investor confidence in our business model and market strategy."

About Mayfield Fund

Mayfield Fund is a venture capital partnership based in Menlo Park, California that specializes in early-stage investing in technology leaders in the Internet and communications industries. Since Mayfield was founded in 1969, the firm has invested in more than 386 companies and has taken approximately 109 companies public. Today, these Mayfield-backed companies represent an aggregate market value of more than $272 billion. Mayfield's portfolio companies who have recently achieved a billion dollar market capitalization include: Advent Software; Avanex; BroadVision; Calico Commerce; Citrix Systems; InterWAVE; Legato Systems; Millennium Pharmaceuticals; Netcentives; Qtera; Redback Networks; SanDisk; Tularik; Tibco and webMethods.

About Alloy Ventures

Alloy Ventures invests in seed and early stage technology companies, with a particular focus on the information sciences and life sciences. Alloy Ventures, Inc. adopted its new name in 1999, and continues to manage the institutional venture capital funds previously managed under the name Asset Management Associates, Inc. The firm is based in Palo Alto, California with over $300 million of committed capital under management. For more information about Alloy Ventures, visit their Web site at http://www.alloyventures.com .

About BoldFish

Started in 1997, BoldFish, Inc. is pioneering the development of out-bound email solutions. The company provides software tools for business-to-customer communication with an integrated email and web-based product. The flagship product is a high-volume, high-speed email delivery system that integrates seamlessly with IT infrastructures.

With an architecture and product that enable campaigns of millions of messages, BoldFish has a unique "opt-in" philosophy and incorporates an anti-spam clause in its licensing. Customers of BoldFish distributing unsolicited, "spam" email are in violation of the license agreement.

Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, BoldFish is privately held and venture funded by Alloy Ventures and the Mayfield Fund. Learn more about BoldFish online at http://www.BoldFish.com .

CONTACT: Kaye McKinzie of Bairey & Bedford Public Relations, 415-927-7365, or Kaye@b2pr.com, for BoldFish, Inc.; Scott Hetherington of BoldFish, Inc., 408-236-3651, or Scott@BoldFish.com.