Front raises $59M to take on Gmail and Outlook with its collaborative and team-based email platform for work

Traditional email clients, such as Gmail and Outlook, were designed for consumers and individuals, not for teams or businesses. By rethinking the inbox from the work context, Front gives teammates access to relevant content, enables productive transparency, and allows brands to scale communications to thousands while keeping the experience personal. Employees are no longer alone in their inbox and can use Front to automate repetitive tasks, integrate tools and workflows into their email experience, and ultimately stay focused on doing their best work.

Enter Front, a San Francisco, California-based collaborative email platform reinventing the inbox so people can accomplish more together. Front transforms the inbox into a flexible platform where knowledge workers can easily organize communication, get context for decisions, and take action faster with their teams. In Front, all work communication — emails, texts, direct messages, etc. — is centralized in one place.

Yesterday, Front announced it has raised $59 million in Series C funding to continue driving product innovation and scale go-to-market functions to accelerate Front’s mission to help the half billion knowledge workers across the globe work happier. The round, which was led by workplace technology leaders from Atlassian, Okta, Qualtrics and Zoom, more than quadrupling the company’s previous valuation.

Founded in 2013 by CEO Mathilde Collin and CTO Laurent Perrin, Front is a collaborative email platform that replaces corporate email with an inbox that unites your team to do their best work. With new workflows, efficient collaboration, and all their communication channels in one place, more than 5,000 businesses rely on their Front inbox to be more productive as a team. With simple @mentions, assignments, shared inboxes, and clear visibility into who is working on what, teams get a shared perspective for handling conversations together. The platform’s powerful automations help people take control of their inbox and prioritize work, while integrations ensure easy access to the apps and data required to get work done efficiently.

“I am thrilled to have these exceptionally talented entrepreneurs and operators join our mission,” said Front co-founder and CEO, Mathilde Collin. “These leaders are building the future of work, and their investment in Front validates our position that email can do so much more for both people and businesses – help them rise to the challenges they face every day, and make work more productive, more delightful, and ultimately more human, for everyone involved.”

“The way we use email for business has been stuck at a standstill for the last twenty years, while every other system and workflow has evolved and improved in time,” said Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom. “Mathilde and her team have built an exceptionally collaborative communications platform to bring work email into the 21st century. Front will play an important role in the future of work, and I’m excited to be a part of the journey.”

Front Team