Spike raises $8 million to make your email look like a chat app

Asynchronous chat apps like Slack have done their best to kill email, but maybe the key to chat replacing email is just making email look like chat? That's the idea of Spike, a productivity startup that has built an email app that organizes emails into chat bubbles with an interface that encourages users to keep it short and simple.

Spike's software began with a focus solely on re-skinning the email experience, but today they're also launching support for collaborative notes and tasks into their interface as they look to provide a cohesive solution for productivity. The company is fitting an awful lot of functionality into one window, but they hope that streamlining these apps together can leave users spending less time tabbing through separate windows and more time getting stuff done.

"Email is a collection of your tasks, so why should it be separated from where your other tasks are?" asks CEO Dvir Ben-Aroya.

The new functionality widens the ambitions of the software but also refocuses the app on a more complete business use case. Ben-Aroya admits that the company hasn't pushed monetization very hard in the past, instead looking to scale up its base of free users in an effort to eventually scale up inside organizations. As the app looks to bring small businesses and larger enterprises onboard, the app is keeping its free tier, but to get past limits on message history and note/task creation users are going to have to upgrade to a $7.99 per month per user plan ($5.99 per month when billed annually).

Alongside its product news, the startup also shared today that it has raised $8 million in a Series A round led by Insight Partners . Wix, NFX and Koa Labs also participated in the round. The company plans to use the cash to aggressively scale hiring and double its team this year.

"[W]e see a massive addressable market for centralized communication hubs to connect disparate messaging channels," Insight Partners VP Daniel Aronovitz said in a statement. "The current climate and associated macro-tailwinds behind remote teamwork have only strengthened our belief that there is a sizable and growing demand for digital collaboration tools."

The company's platform is compatible with most email services and the app is available on Android, iOS, Mac and Windows.

Email startups are often privy to some of a user's most sensitive data and can receive a lot of inquiries regarding privacy. As a result, Ben-Aroya believes his company is far ahead of competitors when it comes to safety. "Unlike many other available email clients, we’re never touching, manipulating, using, reusing or selling any part of the user data," he says.

Spike has raised $16 million in funding to date.