Front App

Front App

Mathilde Collin and Laurent Perrin launched Front in Paris in 2013 before moving the company to San Francisco. The business originated from Collin's observation that teams live in email but lack the collaborative tooling taken for granted in Slack or Notion. Front was her answer: a shared inbox layer that wraps existing email protocols with internal comments, assignment rules, and automated routing. The company has raised $204 million across multiple rounds, including a $65 million Series D at a $1.7 billion valuation in 2022, with Sequoia Capital and Threshold Ventures among its backers. Front operates as a horizontal SaaS business with a go-to-market strategy built around multi-team adoption inside mid-market and enterprise organizations. It integrates with Salesforce, Asana, Jira, and more than 80 other tools, positioning itself as the central nervous system for high-volume customer and vendor communication. The platform's pricing scales from a basic shared inbox through advanced analytics and multi-channel support covering email, SMS, WhatsApp, and chat. Front's architecture treats email not as a legacy channel to route around but as the system of record that departments from logistics to account management already use, layering permissioning and shared context on top of it. As of 2022, Front reported serving over 8,000 organizations including Shopify, Hulu, and Airbnb, with an employee count of roughly 300. The firm maintains its headquarters in San Francisco with an additional office in Paris supporting European engineering and sales. Collin raised $138 million in Series C funding from lead investor Sequoia Capital in 2022, placing her among the small number of female founders who have shepherded a unicorn valuation in enterprise software. The company has not publicly disclosed revenue figures. Front's structural distinction lies in its architectural decision to enforce a shared inbox rather than a ticketing-based workflow. Where Zendesk and Intercom route each inquiry into discrete tickets with statuses, Front keeps email threads intact and adds team-layer collaboration inside them. That design choice means the system of record remains the message — not the ticket — and teams collaborate on it the same way they do on a Google Doc. The company must now defend against both horizontal competitors like Gmail's evolving collaborative features and verticalized customer-service platforms expanding into general business communication.