Colin Nederkoorn

Founder & Chief Executive Officer Customer.io

Last Reviewed: September 26, 2026

Executive Summary

Colin Nederkoorn is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Customer.io, the Portland, Oregon company whose platform lets businesses send email, push, in-app, SMS and webhook messages triggered by what their users actually do. He has run it since he and John Allison started it in April 2012, and in September 2025 the company reported crossing $100 million in annual recurring revenue with more than 8,000 customers. The route there is unusual for a software company of that size: rather than a conventional venture path, Customer.io opened a 2021 crowdfunding round in which about 2,500 people, many of them customers, invested.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Customer.io with John Allison in 2012; Chief Executive Officer and a director since April 2012, per the company’s 2021 SEC offering statement.
• Reported $100M in annual recurring revenue in September 2025, with 8,000+ companies as customers and 64 billion messages sent in the preceding twelve months.
• Led a 2021 Regulation Crowdfunding offering that the company says drew about 2,500 investors at roughly $20M ARR.
• Oversaw the 2022 acquisitions of Gist and Parcel, which brought mobile SDKs, in-app notifications and a new editor into the product.
• Previously Head of Product at ChallengePost.

Professional Journey

Nederkoorn graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2004 with a B.S. in Management and MIS. Before Customer.io he worked in product, most notably as Head of Product at ChallengePost, the online hackathon and challenge platform.

He and John Allison, a computer science graduate who became the company’s chief technology officer, incorporated the business in Delaware in January 2012 as Peaberry Software Inc., trading as Customer.io. The idea, in the company’s own later description, was a product that would “send emails based on what users did or didn’t do in your app” — behavioural messaging for software companies, as opposed to batch newsletters. Five customers signed up in 2012 on the strength of that pitch.

Under his leadership the company went fully distributed in 2014, passed 1,000 customers in 2016 as it expanded beyond email into push, SMS, Slack and webhooks, and added a premium plan and HIPAA compliance in 2018. A visual workflow builder for branching customer journeys followed in 2020. In 2021 Customer.io took an unusual financing step for a company already at roughly $20 million in ARR: a crowdfunding round through Republic’s portal, in which around 2,500 people invested. The offering statement filed with the SEC that June lists Nederkoorn as founder, chief executive officer and director, the largest single holder of voting equity at the time.

In 2022 the company bought Gist and Parcel to strengthen its mobile, in-app and email-editing capabilities, and in 2023 it built out customer data platform features. In September 2025 it crossed $100 million in ARR, which Nederkoorn marked with a public note to customers setting out a push to bring AI capabilities into every part of the product. Customer.io remains headquartered in Portland, where he is based.

Outside work, the company’s biography says he enjoys sailing, coaching youth soccer and cooking.

Education

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

B.S., Management & MIS, 2004