News from back in August: Automattic Invests $30M in Titan, a Business Email Startup. That’s the kind of news that perks my head up as…
- I’m kind of a fan of Automattic and the WordPress universe.
- I, uh, have a blog about email.
- I think the name Titan is cool
- Apparently
.emailis a TLD and now I want one.
Titan looks a lot like Front. Front has been husslin’ since 2014 building a “shared inbox” tool. We use Front at CodePen and it’s honestly indispensable, so I’m actually surprised there aren’t more companies trying to replicate and innovate past them. Front has also taken quite a bit of money and apparently used it well, as around a year ago one researcher valued them at 1.3B and that was before at least one other round.
I agree with what Jan-Erik Asplund says there:
But there’s another company that—albeit growing more slowly—may have a much higher ceiling than the intra-team chat app.
Front is like Slack for your email, except instead of creating another distracting, noisy, always-on tool, Front allows users to spin up ephemeral chats within email threads themselves.
Instead of forwarding an email to a colleague or going into Slack to ask them a question that relates to a customer question or request, you can tag them into the thread and have a quick chat right in the context that’s most useful.
Email is just darn useful context. It can be messy, but that’s where technology can come in and be helpful.
Best of luck to both Titan and Front here. Email has been notoriously hard to build actually useful new tooling around, and these companies both seem to be actually doing it.