Short · 2026-09-29
Front kept the inbox and built a company around it.
A private-beta "collaborative inbox" from Paris in 2014 that grew into customer service software, announcing a $1.7 billion valuation in 2022 without changing its name or its central idea.
On 21 February 2014, a Paris startup in private beta put two words on its Stompstart listing: "Collaborative Inbox." The description was barely longer. Front had added team features to an email client so that people sharing a group address could work it together. "No more dirty bcc, cc and forward. No more unanswered emails," it promised, with Twitter "coming soon." The screenshot uploaded that day shows the pitch in full: a dark page, the words "Collaborative inbox.", and the app itself, a Mac-like mail client split between conversations and a message.
Twelve years on, Front is still called Front, and it still sells the inbox.
The old address, frontapp.com, now redirects to front.com. In June 2022 the company announced a $65 million Series D led by Salesforce Ventures and Battery Ventures at a $1.7 billion valuation. In the same post it dated its founding to 2013, named co-founder and chief executive Mathilde Collin, and said it had nearly 8,000 customers, with offices in San Francisco, Chicago, Paris and Dublin. Those figures are the company's own.
What grew around the inbox is customer service software. In July 2025, Front relaunched the product with AI tools for support teams (topic tracking, a copilot and quality scoring, with an automated agent promised for that autumn) and a redesigned inbox. Its product updates feed carried release notes through August 2026.
The 2014 idea, written in two words, turned out to be big enough to build a company on without replacing it.