Front (YC S14) Raises $66M

Possible acquisition spree coming soon...

Polymail, MailTime, Slidemail, Taskpipes, and maybe a few other YC companies look like they have email technology that could help replace Outlook. Any others?

Sometimes you need capital to explore new growth opportunities while keeping your edge in your core business. Especially since they are going to hire mostly in R&D, seems like they have some product lines they want to build as fast as possible.

Seems money in this case, will basically not be used to maintain current business, but to grow it faster.

Best of luck to them. Written communication and digital communication in general is a wide open market. I think the Slacks, Discords, Gsuites of the world will all be players in this market. Cracking large enterprise will be where the money is made, but you can't help but wonder if the growing vastness of service providers will introduce a certain race to the bottom effect. At a 66MM raise, they're probably valued somewhere around 350~450MM, so they'd need to roll in 115M ARR to be worthy of a 4X topline multiple of that valuation. That's a lot of growth required in a hyper competitive saturated market with a super dominant player that's not exactly planning to stop fighting. Interesting bet to take.

You can’t just “replace Outlook”, you need to replace Office 365, which is a much steeper hill to climb.