While team messaging providers such as Slack Technologies Inc. have made it their mission to replace traditional email, Front Inc. wants to transform it into something more collaborative.

The San Francisco-based startup’s namesake platform provides the ability to create shared inboxes in which multiple employees can work side-by-side and reply to messages separately. Today, Front announced that it has raised $59 million in funding from a group of prominent backers to bring its collaborative spin on email to more enterprises.

Most of the round’s participants were executives from other tech companies. They included Atlassian Corp. Plc. co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes, Okta Inc. co-founder Frederic Kerrest, two of Qualtrics LLC’s founders and Zoom Video Communications Inc. Chief Executive Officer Eric Yuan, among others. They were joined by several existing Front investors, including Sequoia Capital.

Front’s shared inboxes are designed to make it easier to manage mailboxes that receive a lot of messages, like the email inbox of a customer support department. One section of the interface displays messages while another tab contains a chat window that team members can use to coordinate with one another.

Front offers a number of additional features meant to further ease collaboration. There’s a tool for assigning tasks, @ mention support and a widget that indicates when a worker is typing a reply to an email so colleagues won’t accidentally start writing a duplicate response. Front optionally enables teams to pull messages from additional sources besides email, such as their company’s Twitter account or a live chat window embedded in the corporate website.

More than 5,000 organizations currently use Front. For comparison, the startup reported 2,500 customers when it closed its previous $66 million funding round at the start of 2018.

Front’s high-profile new investors are evidently confident that the startup can keep up the growth. Though this latest $59 million investment is less than what the startup took in last time, Front said that the round has quadrupled its valuation.

The startup will use the capital to add more employees and develop new features. Front plans to enhance its platform’s analytics capabilities for measuring team performance, as well as add improvements in other areas including offline work support.

Front is backed by a total of $138 million in outside funding. 

Photo: Front