Front will use the funding in marketing and PR of the product, scaling up its team and of course improving the product.
Mathilde Collin, CEO & Co-founder, Front, said on Medium, that she had her other Co-founder, Laurent Perrin, wanted to make a difference in people’s professional lives, and Front was the perfect vehicle for two reasons. “Building a good company and building a good product, are equally important to me: without one or the other, indeed I wouldn’t bother. Raising our Series A is just a means to do more of both. More resources to hire great people and provide them with the best conditions to achieve their potential; and more resources to build and distribute a great product for the broadest audience,” she said.
Founded in 2013, Front claims to have more than 1,000 companies using the app to manage “team inboxes” (more on that later).
Collin feels that while mail services like Gmail and others make it possible to manage emails as an individual, its gets difficult when teams have to share an email: like contact@, hello@, support@, etc. “The process of figuring out who is responding to what and when is both time-intensive and messy. It slows down communication, and emails often fall through the cracks.”
What started as an email client that brought in text messages, tweets, Facebook messages, and in-app chat to Front and gave each channel its own inbox, has over a period of time morphed into a “unified app” that allows assigning, applying rules, and follow-ups. There are third-party integrations too, prominently among them include Slack, HipChat, Trello, Zapier, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Shopify, Aircall, Jira, Smooch, Github, Hupspot and Asana.
The future roadmap
Front has plans to integrate Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, HelloSign, Grammarly, Chatter, RelateIQ, SalesforceIQ, Marketo, Mixpanel, Base CRM, and Pivotal Tracker.
Bringing more conversation channels into Front too is on the roadmap. Prominent among them include — Olark, Whatsapp, Instagram and LinkedIn.
Front is available on a subscription basis, with prices as low as $12 per user/ per month with five team inboxes. It currently supports Windows and Mac on the desktop and Android and iOS in the mobile space. Work is in progress for an iPad app and integration into Facebook Messenger for businesses.
