Sacra Logo
View PDF
View Model
Details
Headquarters
San Francisco, CA
CEO
Mathilde Collin
Website
Home  >  Companies  >  Front
Front
Front is a team email and collaboration platform.

Revenue

$73.00M

2023

Valuation

$1.30B

2020

Growth Rate (y/y)

18%

2023

Funding

$138.80M

None

Revenue

None

Sacra estimates Front hit $73M in annual recurring revenue in 2023, growing at 18% YoY from $62M in 2022.

The company generates revenue primarily through per-seat subscription pricing, with plans ranging from $19 to $79 per user monthly. About 55% of customers use paid integrations, which drives higher ARPC. Front has approximately 6,000 customers, with particular traction among agencies, professional services firms, logistics companies, and travel businesses.

Front's engagement metrics are exceptional for B2B software, with users spending an average of 2.5 hours daily in the product and maintaining a 72% DAU/MAU ratio - comparable to consumer apps like WhatsApp pre-acquisition. This high engagement supports their strong revenue retention and expansion opportunities.

Valuation

Front is valued at $1.7B as of their June 2022 round, with participation from Salesforce Ventures and Battery Ventures.

Based on 2022 revenue of $62M and that $1.7B valuation, Front traded at a 27.4x revenue multiple.

The company has raised $203.62M in total across 7 funding rounds. Other notable investors include Sequoia Capital, Threshold Ventures, and Uncork Capital. Their most recent funding round in June 2022 included strategic investment from Salesforce Ventures.

Product

Front was founded in 2013 by Mathilde Collin and Laurent Perrin, launching as a collaborative email platform that would bring team-based features to traditional email workflows.

Front found product-market fit as a shared inbox solution for customer support and success teams who needed to collaboratively manage high volumes of customer email. Early customers were primarily agencies, professional services firms, and logistics companies dealing with complex, email-heavy workflows.

The core product functions as an enhanced email client where teams can chat about email threads within the thread itself, rather than switching to separate tools like Slack. When a customer service agent receives a technical question, they can tag their engineering colleague directly in the email thread to get help, rather than forwarding the email or messaging elsewhere. Teams can also set up rules to automatically route and assign emails based on content or urgency.

Front integrates with tools like CRMs, project management software, and knowledge bases to pull relevant customer and project information directly into email threads. This allows users to access data from other systems without leaving their inbox. The product has expanded beyond pure support use cases to serve sales, account management, and other teams that rely heavily on external email communication.

Business Model

Front is a subscription SaaS company that provides a collaborative email platform for teams, monetizing through per-seat pricing across four tiers ranging from $19 to $229 per user monthly. The platform transforms traditional email into a multiplayer experience by enabling team chat within email threads, shared inboxes, and workflow automation.

The company employs a land-and-expand strategy, typically entering organizations through support or operations teams that handle high volumes of customer communication. Front then spreads horizontally across organizations as adjacent teams adopt the platform for its collaborative features and integrations with tools like Salesforce, Asana, and HubSpot.

Front's competitive advantage stems from combining the universal adoption of email with team collaboration features, creating a unique position between single-player email clients like Gmail and specialized help desk solutions like Zendesk. The platform's integration marketplace (with 50+ integrations) generates additional revenue through premium tier requirements while creating switching costs for customers who build workflows around these integrations.

The company's business model benefits from strong network effects - as more team members join Front, the platform becomes more valuable for collaboration, leading to increased seat purchases and higher tier upgrades for advanced features and integrations.

Competition

Front operates in a market that spans team collaboration, help desk software, and email management platforms, with three distinct competitive segments emerging.

Enterprise email and collaboration platforms

Microsoft and Google dominate this space through their Office 365 and G Suite offerings. These incumbents have massive distribution advantages through their email identity layers, with Microsoft reaching 60 million commercial Office customers and Google serving 6 million G Suite business customers. Both could potentially roll out Front-like features to their existing user bases, as Microsoft demonstrated by quickly overtaking Slack's daily active users with Teams.

Help desk and customer communication platforms

Zendesk and Intercom lead this category, with Zendesk serving both sales and support functions across 170,000+ customers and Intercom reaching 30,000+ companies through its conversational marketing platform. These competitors have deeper customer data access - Zendesk through support tickets and Intercom through website visitor tracking. However, they typically remain confined to specific departments rather than achieving company-wide adoption.

Team email management tools

This emerging category includes Help Scout and other specialized inbox collaboration tools. While these competitors focus on specific workflows like support ticketing, Front differentiates through its broader platform approach combining email, chat, and third-party integrations. Front's 137% net dollar retention and 72% DAU/MAU ratio suggest strong product-market fit in this space, though at 6,000 customers its scale remains limited compared to larger competitors.

The key dynamic shaping this market is whether Front can leverage its high engagement metrics and cross-team adoption to build a sustainable moat before larger players copy its core features.

TAM Expansion

Front has tailwinds from the massive shift toward cloud-based productivity tools and collaborative work, with the opportunity to expand into adjacent markets worth $66B collectively across CRM, project management, knowledge management, and conversational marketing.

Email as platform

Front's core advantage is its ability to turn email—where knowledge workers spend 4+ hours daily—into a collaborative platform. With 72% DAU/MAU ratio and 148 minutes of daily active usage, Front has achieved consumer-grade engagement in B2B software. This positions them to become the central hub through which teams access their various workflow tools.

Vertical integration opportunities

Front can leverage its position as an email platform to "back into" various vertical markets. Rather than just integrating with tools like Salesforce or Hubspot, Front could build its own CRM and marketing automation tools directly into the inbox. Their current enterprise plan at $79/seat leaves significant headroom for pricing expansion—Zendesk's enterprise offering is $199/seat.

Platform expansion potential

Front's integration marketplace creates powerful network effects, with 55% of customers using one or more integrations. As more developers build for Front's platform, the product becomes more valuable to users, driving both wider adoption within organizations and higher revenue per customer. This virtuous cycle gives Front time to methodically expand into adjacent markets while increasing switching costs for customers.

The company's high engagement metrics and proven ability to expand across entire organizations (24 of 47 case studies show wall-to-wall adoption) suggest they could successfully challenge incumbents in multiple vertical markets, potentially becoming a full cloud productivity suite worth multiples of their current $1.3B valuation.

Risks

Platform dependency risk: Front's core value proposition relies heavily on email as the fundamental protocol, making them vulnerable to strategic changes by email giants Microsoft and Google. If these platforms restrict API access or launch competing collaborative features, Front could lose critical functionality. Their 6,000 customer base looks particularly exposed compared to Microsoft's 60M and Google's 6M business customers.

Integration moat challenges: Front's strategy depends on building a robust integration ecosystem to create switching costs and expand use cases. However, deeper-integrated competitors like Zendesk and Intercom have stronger data advantages through direct customer behavior tracking. Front needs to convince developers to build meaningful integrations beyond simple data syncing to create true platform lock-in.

Vertical expansion execution: Front's ambitious plan to "back into" $66B of adjacent markets (CRM, project management, etc.) requires successfully building multiple complex products. This puts them in direct competition with focused vertical players while potentially diluting their core collaborative email value proposition. Previous attempts by email platforms to expand vertically (like Google Wave) have largely failed.

Funding Rounds

Share Name Issue Price Issued At
Series D $13.27 Jun 2022
Share Name Issue Price Issued At
Series C $7.68 Jan 2020
Share Name Issue Price Issued At
Series B $2.13 Jan 2018
Share Name Issue Price Issued At
Series A $0.63 May 2016
Series A-Safe-1 $0.31 May 2016
Series A-Safe-2 $0.25 May 2016
View the source Certificate of Incorporation copy.

News

DISCLAIMERS

This report is for information purposes only and is not to be used or considered as an offer or the solicitation of an offer to sell or to buy or subscribe for securities or other financial instruments. Nothing in this report constitutes investment, legal, accounting or tax advice or a representation that any investment or strategy is suitable or appropriate to your individual circumstances or otherwise constitutes a personal trade recommendation to you.

This research report has been prepared solely by Sacra and should not be considered a product of any person or entity that makes such report available, if any.

Information and opinions presented in the sections of the report were obtained or derived from sources Sacra believes are reliable, but Sacra makes no representation as to their accuracy or completeness. Past performance should not be taken as an indication or guarantee of future performance, and no representation or warranty, express or implied, is made regarding future performance. Information, opinions and estimates contained in this report reflect a determination at its original date of publication by Sacra and are subject to change without notice.

Sacra accepts no liability for loss arising from the use of the material presented in this report, except that this exclusion of liability does not apply to the extent that liability arises under specific statutes or regulations applicable to Sacra. Sacra may have issued, and may in the future issue, other reports that are inconsistent with, and reach different conclusions from, the information presented in this report. Those reports reflect different assumptions, views and analytical methods of the analysts who prepared them and Sacra is under no obligation to ensure that such other reports are brought to the attention of any recipient of this report.

All rights reserved. All material presented in this report, unless specifically indicated otherwise is under copyright to Sacra. Sacra reserves any and all intellectual property rights in the report. All trademarks, service marks and logos used in this report are trademarks or service marks or registered trademarks or service marks of Sacra. Any modification, copying, displaying, distributing, transmitting, publishing, licensing, creating derivative works from, or selling any report is strictly prohibited. None of the material, nor its content, nor any copy of it, may be altered in any way, transmitted to, copied or distributed to any other party, without the prior express written permission of Sacra. Any unauthorized duplication, redistribution or disclosure of this report will result in prosecution.