The archive · Developer & Business Tools · Product decision · 2014–2018
Front raises $66M from Sequoia to replace Outlook with a team email client
Profitable Front served 2,500 companies with shared inboxes, then raised $66M led by Sequoia to grow from team email into a full Outlook replacement.
Front
What the business is
Front is a paid collaborative email platform where teams share addresses like help@company.com: messages can be assigned, commented on and answered together, with SMS, Twitter, live chat and integrations such as Salesforce and Jira.
Starting capital：$66M Series B led by Sequoia Capital with DFJ and existing investors; $79M raised in total.
How it started
Mathilde Collin and Laurent Perrin founded Front, a Y Combinator S14 company, on the observation that email for teams is multiplayer: shared addresses need assignment, comments and @-mentions, not a mailing list. Front made that a paid service, expanded to SMS, Twitter and live chat plus dozens of integrations, and by January 2018 was used by 2,500 companies while processing more than 350M emails and messages in 2017.
What happened
Collin said she decided to raise, booked 11 partner meetings in a single week and came away with term sheets from all but one investor. The $66M Series B, led by Sequoia with DFJ, brought total funding to $79M and Sequoia's Bryan Schreier onto the board. The round was ambition, not survival: Front was already profitable with nine years of runway at current pace, and planned to grow from 60 people toward 130 — engineers rather than salespeople — and open a Paris office. The product logic pointed beyond shared mailboxes: 50% of daily active users already used Front exclusively for email and never opened Gmail or Outlook, which Collin read as the opening for a shareable single-user client in a much bigger market.
No ending yet — it is still running.
Background
Front announced a $66M Series B led by Sequoia on 2018-01-24, with DFJ and existing investors participating, bringing total funding to $79M. At the time 2,500 companies used Front to manage shared inboxes and collaborate, and the startup said it planned to go further and become the definitive email product — a direct challenge to Microsoft Outlook.
The product started as collaborative inboxes: instead of a mailing list, teams work together on shared addresses like help@yourcompany.com, assigning messages, @-mentioning colleagues, commenting before replying and pulling context from integrations. Front expanded into text messages, Twitter and website live chat, and built dozens of integrations with services such as Salesforce and Jira; in 2017 it processed more than 350M emails and messages for customers including Shopify, LVMH, Convoy, HubSpot and Onefinestay.
The raise was done from strength. CEO Mathilde Collin scheduled 11 partner meetings in one week and ended it with term sheets from all but one investor; the company was already making money as a paid service and had roughly nine years of runway. The round let it be more ambitious on the product: with 50% of daily active users already using Front exclusively and never opening Gmail or Outlook, the team saw a path from multiplayer email to a client for single users that could be shared — a much bigger market, in Collin's words.
What has to be true
- Shared inboxes are a universal, unglamorous pain that teams would pay to fix before they would switch their personal email.
- Front was already profitable with nine years of runway, so the round came from strength: 11 meetings in one week produced term sheets from all but one investor.
- Product data pointed beyond teams: half of daily active users had already abandoned Gmail and Outlook entirely.
- Staying small and lean — 60 people, hiring engineers rather than salespeople — kept iteration fast while attacking a category controlled by Microsoft.
What can be applied
A narrow, paid wedge can fund an assault on an incumbent: shared-inbox collaboration kept Front profitable with years of runway, so the round bought expansion, not survival.
Aftermath
As of 2018-01-24 the Series B had just been announced: Front said it would use the money to be more ambitious on the product, grow from 60 people toward 130 over the following year, hire engineers rather than salespeople, and open a second office in Paris to attract talent. The TechCrunch story records no valuation and no later milestones, so this entry stops at the announcement.
Sources
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