how these other e-mail applications haven’t changed in six years,” he adds. “It’s still a Version 1 product.”
Eye founded Boxer in June 2012 and currently has seven employees. The fundraising round last week was led by Sutter Hill Ventures. Boxer had previously raised $300,000 in convertible debt.
He isn’t the only Austin entrepreneur aiming to “reinvent e-mail.” David Johnston is the founder of Engine.co, a Chrome extension for Gmail, which analyzes the information inside the messages and uses natural language programming to bring up information in other e-mails that is relevant to it by connecting e-mail accounts to 28 data sources, including calendars, contacts, and social media sites.
“Our e-mail lives in these silos that don’t talk to each other,” he says. With Engine, if a colleague asks for a report from a work project a few weeks ago, Johnston says the service “will automatically find that for you and put it in the sidebar of the Gmail inbox.”
He likens the transformation to how web searching was before Google. “In the early days of the Internet, it was really hard to find things online,” he says. “We didn’t see how things were connected.”
Engine, which was founded in January 2012 and now has 25 employees, is currently in beta mode with plans for a full launch early next year. The startup initially raised a seed round of $150,000 last year, and raised $500,000 this year from angels. A Series A round is planned for early next year.
Tomorrow, Joshua Baer, who founded and runs the Capital Factory co-working space in Austin, will launch what he calls the “App store for E-mail,” featuring both Boxer and Engine, as well as 55 other e-mail apps like Sanebox and Mailbox.
Earlier this month, Baer launched his own syndicate on AngelList, specifically focusing on startups trying to innovate in e-mail. So far, he’s raised $40,000 from four investors, including Brad Feld, the managing director of Foundry Group in Boulder.
Baer has made e-mail startups a specialty. He started Otherinbox from
