Chatflow Ltd., a startup doing business as Spike that wants to change how business users interact with emails, has closed a $8 million round of funding led by Insight Partners to build out its product vision.

The round was announced this morning. It follows a $5 million investment last March that saw the participation of publicly-traded website development provider Wix.com Ltd., NFX and Koa Labs, all of which contributed to Spike’s newly announced raise as well.

Spike has developed a “conversational inbox” that displays the user’s emails as chat messages in a WhatsApp-like interface, for most existing email services on Mac, Windows, Android, iOS and the web. The startup says this format makes email threads easier to manage than the traditional layout used by services such Gmail. One of the main conveniences is that Spike hides signatures and most of the other information that doesn’t belong to the main body of an email, which speeds up navigation for users.

Alongside the chatlike interface, Spike provides the standard productivity features that can be expected from an inbox application. It has calendar integrations, a search bar and an automatic prioritization feature that shifts less important messages such as newsletters to a secondary inbox.

The startup’s long-term ambitions extend beyond email. Spike believes that its platform, with its chat-based interface, can serve as a centralized hub for performing common collaboration tasks that normally require having multiple tabs open. It has been working to realize this vision by building out capabilities atop its core email feature set.

Spike provides an encrypted communications tool that allows users to apply AES256 encryption to sensitive messages as a way of preventing eavesdropping. Today, alongside the funding announcement, the startup added more advanced features that enable teams using Spike to share to-do items and notes. It’s topping it all off with document collaboration tools that it says can eliminate the need for third-party document-sharing platforms.

“We were founded a few years back with one big mission: reinventing communications for individuals and businesses,” Spike Chief Executive Dvir Ben-Aroya told SiliconANGLE in an interview. “Spike really wants to own the entire communications space.”

While noting the presence of giants such as Google Microsoft Corp. as well as fast-growing upstarts such as Slack Inc. and Box Inc., Ben-Aroya isn’t shy about the fact that “I’m going after all of them.” That said, he’s aiming chiefly at the 4 billion people using email rather than the tens of millions using Slack or Box.

Spike will double the size of its team over the next year to support the product development effort. The startup plans to build more tools and services to extend its platform to yet more collaboration use cases.

Spike has raised $16 million in venture funding to date.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Image: Spike