{"id":3982,"date":"2017-03-10T01:30:50","date_gmt":"2017-03-10T01:30:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/astro-raises-an-8-million-series-a-for-its-ai-powered-email-solution-for-teams.html"},"modified":"2017-03-10T01:30:50","modified_gmt":"2017-03-10T01:30:50","slug":"astro-raises-an-8-million-series-a-for-its-ai-powered-email-solution-for-teams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rbsitsoftwaresolution.in\/blog\/astro-raises-an-8-million-series-a-for-its-ai-powered-email-solution-for-teams.html","title":{"rendered":"Astro raises an $8 million Series A for its AI-powered email solution for teams"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

On the surface, Astro<\/a>, launching its public beta today, is a nifty but not completely necessary email client that combines machine intelligence and a bot interface to improve workflows and increase the signal to noise ratio of mail for power users. But the real story is that\u00a0the startup, backed with a new $8 million Series A led by Redpoint<\/span><\/a>, is gearing up to pitch\u00a0enterprises on its\u00a0collaboration platform\u00a0that combines AI, social graphs and integrations with\u00a0common CRM, ticketing and group messaging tools.<\/p>\n

Astro, evoking images of Jetsons-era futurism, is a standalone mobile and desktop client for email. It has all the bells and whistles of a high-end Gmail replacement\u00a0\u2014 think snooze, send later, priority inbox, unsubscribe and custom notifications. But in the face of the bot-pocolypse, Astro is trying to sell users on the idea of an email bot that can act as the conversational interface for many common workflows like archiving messages and setting reminders.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The reality for Astro and its competitors is that new email solutions crop up and fail faster than we can learn to accommodate them into our workflows \u2014 we\u2019re still getting over the death of Mailbox<\/a>. But Astro plans to supplement its revenue in a very serious way by servicing enterprises, Slack style.<\/p>\n

Astro is launching its public beta today to get the email client into as many hands as possible. As the company builds partnerships with hypotheticals like\u00a0Atlassian\u2019s JIRA, Salesforce and Github, the value of the bot interface will increase. Instead of\u00a0offering up information that could otherwise be gleaned from a quick inbox glance, Astro will use\u00a0web APIs to aggregate intelligence and push it to people\u00a0within their inbox, without forcing a new and\u00a0awkward process on\u00a0users.<\/p>\n

In the spirit of LinkedIn, Astro built a social graph that enterprise teams can use to find connections to avoid the dreaded cold email. The platform keeps tabs on the emails sent by colleagues and can recommend common connections to use for warm introductions. And because tasks within email occupy\u00a0a majority of most workdays<\/a>,\u00a0there\u2019s arguably few places better to capture copious data.<\/p>\n

Satish Dharmaraj, partner at Redpoint and investor in Astro, explained to TechCrunch that he empathizes\u00a0with the anxiety generated around\u00a0bot investments, but that Astro can work because it works to tackle a specific problem and has the potential to measurably improve productivity. The fact that Astro\u2019s founders\u00a0Andy Pflaum and Roland Schemers collaborated with\u00a0Dharmaraj on\u00a0Zimbra, which initially exited for $350 million to Yahoo<\/a>, sure can\u2019t hurt.<\/p>\n

As it pushes into enterprises, it will run up against startups like Nimble, which just raised its own $9 million Series A<\/a>, with a similar thesis around reimagining\u00a0the rolodex. The Astro team will have to be prepared to make a hard sale against Salesforce\u2019s\u00a0RelateIQ<\/a>, and other Slack-centric options. And while Astro is intuitive to use,\u00a0it\u2019s fundamentally a standalone product vying\u00a0to stand out in a sea of consolidated enterprise platforms.<\/p>\n

Astro\u2019s $8 million Series A also included\u00a0Aspect Ventures<\/a>, Harrison Metal<\/a> and Upside Partnership<\/a> in addition to Redpoint. The beta is available directly from the Astro website<\/a>, though it now appears to have filled and become a waitlist.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Featured Image: Bryce Durbin<\/small><\/p>\n

Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunchIt\/~3\/efYvSkWKki4\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the surface, Astro, launching its public beta today, is a nifty but not completely necessary email client that combines machine intelligence and a bot interface to improve workflows and <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[19],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-3982","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-enterprise-software","tag-enterprise"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t