Regaining control of your inbox

Apr 19, 2013

Startups & Venture Capital

Startup helps users gain control of email

Taryn Plumb, Special to the Journal

Courtesy

With email and social networking sites, information is constantly bombarding you — some of it important, but much of it noise.
Cambridge startup Cloze, however, aims to help users cut through the clutter. Cloze offers a free app that sorts and prioritizes email and social networking posts and updates.
“It’s helping people regain control of their lives,” said co-founder Dan Foody, who, while spending extensive time on the road, said he had to sift through as many as 150 emails a day, and 10 times that in social posts.
Users, he said, “can get through all of the communication, catch up much more easily.”
Using algorithms, the app interacts with various email platforms as well as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and analyzes the history of their online communication.
The app then is able to figure out who matters most to its users. Incoming mail and messages are sorted into lists scored from zero to 100; colleagues and friends who have the most or best interactions receive the highest scores, and are moved to the top. All of the email platforms and social sites are also merged into a single view, so users don’t have to individually sign into each one.
The goal, according to Foody, is to “organize it around people,” and “leave all the stuff that doesn’t matter for when you’ve got time for it.”
Founded in February 2012 by Foody and Alex Cote, Cloze is backed by $1.2 million from Greylock Partners, Kepha Partners and NextView Ventures.
The startup initially launched its product as a Web version in June 2012 and as an Apple iOS app this past February. The app will soon be released to Android and other platforms, the company said. And while the basic capabilities will largely remain free, Cloze plans to generate revenue by adding premium capabilities for its heaviest users, Foody said, and also potentially add some specific features for sales and marketing. But the company won’t sell any user information; everything is encrypted, Foody said, and “your data is your own.”
Though the number of users for the app aren’t being disclosed, Foody said the user base is growing by more than 50 percent month over month. Cloze has less than 10 employees but is actively hiring, he said.
Eric Hjerpe of Kepha Partners, a board member at Cloze, said there are a wealth of options for expanding the startup’s product.
For instance, Hjerpe said Cloze has seen heavy demand from companies that are interested in deploying it to salespeople. And upcoming features include the ability to search the entire content of emails and attachments (as opposed to just by name or company, as is the current capability), he noted.
Hjerpe said he uses Cloze at least 20 times a day himself, having uploaded 10 to 15 years of email to it. Now he has the ability to see and find the more than 30,000 people he’s interacted with over the years.
“I’m one of its biggest fans, I think,” Hjerpe said. “I love this thing.”

Original story link.