Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

Customer communication platform Front is holding an event today to introduce three new features. These new features focus on showing you more information about your customers right from Front’s user interface.

If you’re not familiar with Front, the company started as a shared email inbox product so that you can interact with incoming emails as a team. For instance, if your company uses email lists, such as support@companyname.com, sales@companyname.com or jobs@companyname.com, multiple team members can see incoming emails in Front.

Before replying, you can triage conversations by assigning them to specific team members, discuss the current conversation in the comment section or show your email draft before sending it.

Over time, Front has evolved to integrate more communication channels. You can now use Front for SMS conversations, live chat on your website with your customers, Facebook messages, etc. The company has also refined its product with more powerful features.

For instance, you can set up rules to automate your workflow with simple “if this then that” rules. It’s a good way to spread out work across multiple team members and make sure the right person sees the incoming message as quickly as possible.

Today, the company is showcasing features that will be particularly useful for teams that interact with bigger customers, such as sales, support and customer success teams. First, Front users will be able to learn more about the customer they’re interacting with directly from their inbox.

The refreshed context panel works better if the team is interacting with multiple people working for your client. Instead of viewing past conversations with someone in particular, you can view past conversations with everyone working for this client.

Front already integrates with your CRM, such as Salesforce or HubSpot. You can now more easily pull data into the context panel. You can see the name of the account owner, the customer segment and the SLA (service-level agreement) commitment with this customer.

Image Credits: Front

Second, Front is adding new capabilities for its automated routing feature with deeper integrations with your CRM. For instance, you can find the name of the account owner in your CRM and assign incoming emails to the account owner directly.

If the account owner changes in Salesforce, rules will be automatically updated in Front. You can also fetch annual revenue data from your CRM and set a VIP tag if you’re receiving a message from an important customer.

Image Credits: Front

Finally, Front will soon upgrade the analytics pages. For instance, you can track the team’s performance for a specific account and compare that to the SLA.

These updates position Front as a tool that works better for bigger enterprise clients with expensive B2B contracts. Current Front customers include Shopify, Dropbox, Flexport, Checkout.com, Lydia and Airbnb.

Image Credits: Front

Front is raising a $59 million Series C funding round. Interestingly, the startup hasn’t raised with a traditional VC firm leading the round. A handful of super business angels are investing directly in the productivity startup and leading the round.

Business angels include Atlassian co-founder and co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian President Jay Simons, Okta co-founder and COO Frederic Kerrest, Qualtrics co-founders Ryan Smith and Jared Smith and Zoom CEO Eric Yuan. Existing investors Sequoia Capital, Initialized Capital and Anthos Capital are participating in this round, as well.

While Front doesn’t share its valuation, the company says that the valuation has quadrupled compared to the previous funding round. Annual recurring venue has also quadrupled over the same period.

The structure of this round is unusual, but it’s on purpose. Front, like many other startups, is trying to redefine the future of work. That’s why the startup wanted to surround itself with leaders of other companies who share the same purpose.

“First, because we didn’t need to raise (we still had two years of runway), and it’s always better to raise when we don’t need it. The last few months have given me much more clarity into our go-to-market strategy,” Front co-founder and CEO Mathilde Collin told me.

Front is a collaborative inbox for your company. For instance, if you want to share an email address with your co-workers (support@mycompany.com or jobs@mycompany.com), you can integrate those shared inboxes with Front and work on those conversations as a team.

It opens up a ton of possibilities. You can assign conversations to a specific person, @-mention your co-workers to send them a notification, start a conversation with your team before you hit reply, share a draft with other people, etc.

Front also supports other communication channels, such as text messages, WhatsApp messages, a chat module on your website and more. As your team gets bigger, Front helps you avoid double replies by alerting other users when you’re working on a reply.

In addition to those collaboration features, Front helps you automate your workload as much as possible. You can set up automated workflows so that a specific conversation ends up in front of the right pair of eyes. You can create canned responses for the entire team, as well.

Front also integrates with popular third-party services, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Clearbit and dozens of others. Front customers include MailChimp, Shopify and Stripe.

While Front supports multiple channels, email represents the biggest challenge. If you think about it, email hasn’t changed much over the past decade. The last significant evolution was the rise of Gmail, G Suite and web-based clients. In other words, Front wants to disrupt Outlook and Gmail.

With today’s funding round, the company plans to iterate on the product front with Office 365 support for its calendar, an offline mode and refinements across the board. The company also plans to scale up its sales and go-to-market team with an office in Phoenix and a new CMO.

Front, the company that lets you manage your inboxes as a team, is adding one more channel: WhatsApp. Starting today, you can read and reply to people contacting you through WhatsApp.

This feature is specifically targeted at users of WhatsApp Business. You can get a business phone number through Twilio and then hand out that number to your customers.

After that, you can see the messages coming in Front and treat them like any Front message. In particular, you can assign conversations to specific team members so that your customers get a relevant answer as quickly as possible. If you need more information, Front integrates with popular CRMs, such as Salesforce, Pipedrive and HubSpot.

You also can discuss with other teammates before sending a reply to your customer. It works like any chat interface — you can at-mention your co-workers and start an in-line chat in the middle of a WhatsApp thread. When you’re ready to answer, you can hit reply and send a WhatsApp message.

Front started with generic email addresses, such as sales@yourcompany or jobs@yourcompany. But the company has added more channels over time, such as Facebook, Twitter, website chat and text messages.

If you’ve already been using Front with text messages, you can now easily add WhatsApp and use the same service for that new channel.

Front is launching a major revamp today. And it starts with a brand new design. Front is now powered by React for the web and desktop app, which should make it easier to add new features down the road.

Front hasn’t pivoted to become something else. At heart, it remains a multiplayer email client. You can share generic email addresses with your coworkers, such as sales@yourcompany or jobs@yourcompany. You can then assign emails, comment before replying and integrate your CRM with your email threads.

But the company is also adding a bunch of new features. The most interesting one is the ability to start a thread with your team without having to send an email first. If a client sends you an email, you can comment on the thread and mention your coworkers just like on a Facebook post.

Many companies already use emails for internal communications. So they started using Front to talk to their coworkers. Before today, you had to send an original email and then people could comment on it. Now, you can just create a post by giving it a title and jumping to the comment section. It’s much more straightforward.

“We aren’t planning for all internal conversations to move to Front, but a lot of them very well could. A tool like Slack is often used for questions that don’t require the immediate response that Slack demands,” co-founder and CEO Mathilde Collin told me. “By bringing these messages into Front, we aim to reduce disruptions and help people stay focused.”

In other words, a Slack message feels like a virtual tap on the shoulder. You have to interrupt what you’re doing to take a minute and answer. Front can be used for asynchronous conversations and things that don’t need an immediate response. That’s why you can now also send Slack messages to Front so that you can deal with them in Front.

With this update, Front is making sharing more granular. Front isn’t just about shared addresses. You can assign your personal emails to a coworker — this is much more efficient than forwarding an email. Now, you can easily see who can read and interact with an email thread at the top of the email view.

If somebody sends an email to Sarah and Sam, they’ll both have a copy of this email in their personal inboxes. If Sarah and Sam start commenting and @-mentioning people, Front will now merge the threads.

As a user, you get a unified inbox with all your personal emails, emails that were assigned to you and messages assigned to your team inbox.

Finally, Front has improved its smart filtering system. You can now create more flexible rules. For instance, if an email matches some or all criteria, Front can assign an email to a team or a person, send an automated reply, trigger another rule and more.

The new version of Front will be available later this month. Once again, Front remains focused on its core mission — making work conversations more efficient and more flexible. The company doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel and still relies heavily on emails.

Many people (myself included) say that email is too often a waste of time. Dealing with emails doesn’t necessarily mean getting work done. Front wants to remove all the pains of this messaging protocol so that you can focus on the content of the messages.

European startup studio eFounders is slowly but surely building a portfolio of successful software-as-a-service startups. The company is behind some of the most promising enterprise startups in recent years.

Over the past six months, six eFounders startups have raised $120 million in total, with Front and Aircall leading the pack with a $66 million and a $29 million round. Spendesk raised $9.9 million. Forest, Slite and Station raised seed rounds.

Some of them also attended Y Combinator’s most recent batch. Finally, Technicis acquired TextMaster for an undisclosed sum.

If you don’t know the eFounders model, it’s quite simple. At first, the core eFounders team comes up with an idea and hires a founding team. In exchange for financial and human resources, eFounders keep a significant stake in its startups.

After a year or two, startups should have proven that they can raise a seed round and operate on their own. This way, eFounders can move on to the next project and start new companies.

eFounders currently lists 14 companies on its website. In addition to the ones I already mentioned, there is Mailjet, Mention, Foxintelligence, Forest, Hivy, Folk, Upflow, Briq and Illustrio.

Based on this list, you’d think that eFounders has a nearly perfect track record. But eFounders had to stop a couple of projects, such as PressKing and Muxi. Illustrio seems to be on pause right now as well.

Nevertheless, it’s clear that eFounders has cooked up a secret playbook for software-as-a-service startups. More importantly, it’s also clear that eFounders managed to attract some talented entrepreneurs to lead those startups and transform them into their own startups.

Overall, eFounders companies have raised $175 million in total, have 100,000 clients and 500 employees. Together, they generate $50 million in revenue. eFounders itself has raised $11.4 million.

It’s going to be a long play for eFounders as the company only generates revenue when there’s an exit or a secondary market transaction. As long as startups keep raising more money, eFounders doesn’t get anything, and its stake gets diluted. It’ll only make money when there’s a significant acquisition or an IPO. But the valuation of eFounders’ portfolio also keeps growing, so the outcome looks more and more positive.

 Front has been around for three years, but the startup is only releasing a proper mobile app now. If you’re a Front user, it brings all the features from the desktop version to your phone so that you can manage emails and other communication protocols in multiplayer mode. Front’s basic premise is quite simple. With Front, you can collaborate, comment, assign and reply to those… Read More

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