FRONT

Mathilde Collin and Laurent Perrin started Front in Paris in 2013. The problem they saw was old and annoying.

Shared company email addresses, the support@ and sales@ kind, were a mess. Nobody knew who was replying to what, messages got dropped, and important customers slipped through the cracks.

Collin and Perrin built a tool that turned those shared inboxes into a real workspace where a team could assign, comment on, and answer messages together. They got into Y Combinator in 2014 and moved to San Francisco.

Collin became the face of the company, known for writing openly about the hard parts of being a founder.

Companies pay Front a monthly fee for each user to manage all the messages their teams send and receive. Think of every email, text, and chat a customer sends landing in one shared inbox a whole team can work from together.

Support, sales, and operations teams use it so nothing gets lost and everyone can see who is handling what. Pricing scales with the number of seats and the features a company needs.

The simple version. Front sells teams a shared inbox that feels personal to the customer but stays organized on the inside.

The core product is the Front shared inbox, where teams manage email, text messages, and social messages together in one place. Teammates can assign conversations, leave private comments, and draft replies together before anything goes out.

Front also offers analytics so managers can see response times and workload, plus automation rules that route messages to the right person. More recently it added AI features that draft replies and summarize long threads.

The whole thing is built to feel like personal email on the outside and a coordinated team tool on the inside.

Front grew on two things. A genuinely useful product and a founder who built an audience.

Mathilde Collin wrote candidly online about running a startup, from fundraising to burnout, and that openness turned her into a magnet for talent, press, and investors. The famous example is her Series B.

She raised $66 million from Sequoia in just five days in 2018 by running a tight, organized process. Front also leaned hard into the idea that email was not dead, just badly built for teams, and rode that message into thousands of companies.

Front sells into a crowded, giant-infested market. It competes with free tools people already have, like Gmail and Outlook, plus big customer service platforms like Zendesk.

Convincing companies to pay for a better shared inbox when they already have email is a constant uphill pitch. Growth also has to justify that $1.7 billion valuation from 2022, a number set when money was cheap and investors paid up for software.

Now Front has to grow into that price, all while AI reshapes how customer messages get handled in the first place.

Front has raised over $200 million. Social Capital led a $10 million Series A in 2016.

Sequoia Capital led the famous $66 million Series B in 2018, the round Mathilde Collin closed in five days. The 2020 Series C of $59 million was unusual.

It was led by a group of software company founders and executives, including Zoom's Eric Yuan and Qualtrics co-founder Ryan Smith, rather than a traditional fund. In 2022, Salesforce Ventures and Battery Ventures led a $65 million round that valued Front at $1.7 billion.

The cap table is a bet that a French-founded email tool could win in Silicon Valley.