Announcing Front’s Series C — and what’s in store for 2020

This post is from our Series C round. Read our latest funding announcement about our Series D here!

We’re thrilled to announce that with this new decade comes a new chapter for Front: we’ve raised $59 million in our Series C funding round!

Our Series C is unique. Along with Sequoia Capital, it’s led by some of the biggest leaders in the future of work space — including executives from Atlassian, Okta, Qualtrics, and Zoom:

• Atlassian co-CEO and co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes

• Atlassian President Jay Simons

• Okta executive vice chairman, COO, and co-founder Frederic Kerrest

• Qualtrics co-founder and CEO Ryan Smith

• Qualtrics co-founder and CTO Jared Smith

• Zoom CEO Eric Yuan

We firmly believe email can do so much more for people and businesses, and support from these respected leaders further proves the size of the opportunity ahead of us. Front sits at the intersection of 3 distinct market trends:

1. Consumers are demanding a more genuine, more human relationship with the brands they do business with.

2. Businesses need more productivity, scale, and reach to remain competitive in the global market.

3. Employees are asking for more meaning and fulfillment from their work.

We believe that the future of work will be rooted in meeting these new expectations, and that the inbox will be the key platform from which to do it.

It all starts with email

Over the last 20 years, every tool we use at work has changed for the better — except one: email. Traditional email was never built for business, and we’re all feeling the pain. Critical messages get lost in the clutter, we’re out of the loop on key decisions, and scattered notifications and collaboration apps only add to the mess.

Front tackles this problem at its core: by rethinking your inbox. Instead of forwarding and CCing emails, handling conversations together is simple with @mentions and assignments. Teams get a shared perspective to handle conversations together, so they’re more productive, connected, and in-tune with customers.

And we’re just getting started. With this round of financing, we’ll focus on driving product innovation and scaling go-to-market functions to accelerate our mission to help teams work happier. Here’s a peek into our plans for the future of email in 2020. We’re excited — and we hope you are, too.

Front in 2020: an early look at our product roadmap

This year, we’ll help you transform email into a powerful platform that drives your business forward. We’ll also give users an inbox experience that makes getting work done simpler than ever.

The features we’re about to share are just a sneak peek into what we’ll be working on this year. Before we dive in, know that there’s even more to come 🙂

Thousands of emails? Take control with Front

With traditional email, getting messages into the right hands is a tangled mess. That’s why a cornerstone of Front has always been to give you tools like assignments and rules to route conversations efficiently — right from your inbox.

This year, we’re strengthening this foundation to make Front workflows more powerful than ever before. Streamlined setup will enable every team to spend less time managing their inboxes, and more time with their customers.

• ➡️ Smart routing with load balancing and a new assignment workflow builder gets messages to the right people on your team faster.

• ⚙️ Rule templates for our most popular workflows will make setup a snap. Choose a pre-built rule from the library, plug in your team’s specifics, and you’re off to the races.

• ⏰ Set SLAs without juggling multiple tags and rules. Just set your response time targets, and Front will take care of the rest to ensure every message is handled on time.

• 📇 Enrich contacts with data from tools like Salesforce or Segment to route messages by account owner, renewal date, and more. With a complete view of every customer, your team can respond with the context they need to deliver a personalized experience, every time.

Ever been unsure where to start with rules and automation in Front? We’ll suggest rules to guide you along the way, so organizing your inbox and optimizing response times is easier than ever.

Deeper insights to fuel better decisions

Usually, you can’t answer important questions about your business with email. Front changed that with the first analytics platform built specifically for your inbox. With Front, you can measure response time, see how often customers are reaching out, improve team performance, and more.

Now, we’re enhancing Front analytics to give you even more insights. Here are a few ways we’re unlocking your inbox data to help your team accomplish more every day:

• 📈 Ready-to-go dashboards for SLAs, customer experience, and more make reporting a breeze. Quickly and consistently understand team performance, no ad-hoc analysis needed.

• ⚡️ Faster analytics will make pulling reports quick and easy. We’re investing in our analytics infrastructure to make sure you get the reports you need in seconds.

• 🔍 Custom views enable you to filter inbox activity and monitor important issues at a glance. They give you the real-time visibility you need to ensure every conversation is accounted for.

Faster teams, happier customers

Businesses rely on email for their most important communications — like conversations with customers. When your inbox slows you down, your customer experience gets pulled down too. That’s why we’re building features that help you navigate and prioritize your inbox in a flash:

• 🌎 Offline mode will make Front’s desktop and mobile apps available anywhere you want to get work done, whether you’re at your desk or on the go. No wifi? No problem.

• 💬 Quote and reply to comments to reference a specific part of the conversation, so your team immediately knows what you want to discuss for faster decision making.

• 👩🏻‍💻 Customize a context sidebar with the details you need to handle conversations, like your contact details, calendar, and Salesforce records. Instead of switching between integrations, all the information you need is right there at a glance.

• 🗓 Brand new calendars for G Suite and Office 365 with quick scheduling tools, availability previews, and collaboration on invites to make managing your calendar easier than ever.

A few more features to help you work through your inbox at light speed? Prioritized search results, autocorrect suggestions, quick snooze options, and a brand new message template manager with full previews of your messages. We’ve got dozens of small improvements like these to make email in Front the best experience yet.

We’re ready for what’s ahead

We couldn’t be more excited to continue building a better Front for you and your team. While improving the most used business app is no small feat, our Series C funding will propel us to move faster.

We are so grateful for the continued support of our customers, investors, family, and friends — and we look forward to helping teams around the world to work happier. Be sure to follow along with all the latest Front updates on our Changelog and Public Roadmap!