Mixmax, which is
making e-mail interactive with apps that set-up calendar meetings and
polls, raised $1.5 million from Harrison Metal, Floodgate’s Mike Maples
and Ann Miura-Ko, Ram Shriram of Sherpalo Ventures and angels Eric Ries,
Soundcloud CEO Alex Ljung, Nuzzel CEO Jonathan Abrams, Inkling CEO Matt
MacInnis and Soundcloud’s Eric Wahlforss.“It’s crazy that we have these incredibly powerful devices and we’re still communicating the same way we did 25 years ago,” said co-founder Olof Mathé, who added that his experience in Gmail doesn’t really differ that much from the Pine e-mail client he used two decades ago.
Mathé said the web has since evolved, with lots of expressive communication forms through video-conferencing and collaborative editing.
“E-mail remains static, plain, and un-actionable,” the company said in a statement announcing its funding round today.
Mixmax is a simple Chrome plug-in that adds extra functionality to your G-mail accounts. You can put in little apps or widgets to schedule meetings, annotate documents, make purchases, confirm orders or complete surveys — all within the e-mail. (So you don’t have to context switch to another calendar or browser tab to do a task.)
Recipients don’t need to have Mixmax installed to see any of the additional content. There’s also a Mixmax SDK, which lets developers build other kinds of apps that can work inside of email.
Mathé and his co-founders Chanpory Rith, and Brad Vogel came out of Inkling where they built an e-book authoring platform called Habitat. They’ve also done stints at Skype, Google and Apple on communications products.
They plan to use the $1.5 million in fresh funding to hire additional engineers, expand the platform and build out the SDK.