Startups · Satire
Startup Raises $40 Million for AI That Summarises Emails You Were Going to Read Anyway
Investors say the market opportunity is 'enormous' for a product that replaces the thirty seconds it takes to open an email.
SAN FRANCISCO — InboxZen, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to summarise email threads, has raised $40 million in a Series A round led by Sequoia Capital, the company announced Wednesday.
The product, which costs $29 per month, reads your emails and produces a shorter version of them for you to read instead.
“People are drowning in information,” said CEO and co-founder Alexis Gunderson, who has not read a full email since 2022. “We’re giving them their lives back.”
The company currently has 3,000 paying customers, which Gunderson described as “strong early traction.”
When asked whether users found it faster to simply read the emails themselves, Gunderson said that was “missing the point.”
“It’s about the cognitive load,” she explained. “When you see a long email, there’s anxiety. We’re eliminating that anxiety by showing you a shorter version of the thing that made you anxious.”
The funding will be used to expand the product to also summarise the summaries, for users who find them too long.
