Canton startup
410 Labs hopes to raise up to $5 million in its third round of funding this year. Founded by Dave Troy and Matt Koll, the company will use the money to refine its email management program,
Mailstrom, and to double its current staff of six with design and marketing positions.
CEO Dave Troy says the second round of financing will be open to angel investors and venture capitalists, although he did not give a timeframe for closing the round. He also did not give a precise figure but said it would be "under $5 million."
“We are focused on furthering the product,” Troy says of Mailstrom. 410 Labs introduced it last year, an outgrowth of an earlier product called Shortmail, to manage email and text messages. Since its founding in 2011, 410 Labs has raised a total of $1 million. Its first round of financing, it raised $750,000 privately and from angel investors. Another $300,000 was subsequently raised privately.
In January, 410 Labs offered a free beta version of Mailstrom. The financing will be used to refine the web application for large-scale email users, or people who receive 50 and more email messages per day.
Since its launch as a free beta program, 44,000 people have processed 550 million emails via Mailstrom. “That gives you a sense of how much email is floating around,” says Troy.
Troy credits a technology blogger, Adam Dachis of Lifehacker, with the number of beta users. “When it first came out, there wasn’t a lot of notice. Then an online blogger wrote about it in February and we went from a few thousand [beta users] to 30,000 users in a couple of weeks,” he says. A mention in a story on email in The New York Times Personal Tech section didn't hurt, either.
Mailstrom is available on a free trial basis for the foreseeable future although at some point, 410 Labs will set a fee for versions with different options, says Troy.
Email was introduced in 1971. It hasn’t changed much since then, says Troy, but the mushrooming number of email has created a problem that Mailstrom is intended to solve.
Mailstrom works with any standard email system. It uses headers and subject lines to organize emails by a number of categories, including sender, mailing list, social network and shopping network. It can delete a large number of messages from a single sender or company, and can skim by content or time period.
Following the industry’s best practices for emails, the program does not open and read the message body, nor does it store the emails.
“It takes an initially overwhelming number and makes it actionable,” says Troy.
He has found that personality determines how people deal with emails. “Some delete every day, some don’t delete at all. We built an email product that works for a lot of different personalities.”
The company is located in the Emerging Technology Center at Canton incubator. Troy has not decided whether to accompany the incubator this fall to its new site in Highlandtown.
Source: David Troy, 410 Labs
Writer: Barbara Pash