Your Life's Inbox

Everyone knows how bad email is, but we've been conditioned to accept it.

We text with our closest friends, but to participate in digital life, you still need email, which runs on a protocol that was designed in 1982. Gmail got the closest to reinvention with labels and search, but it’s still the same fundamental concept: a never-ending deterministic stream of messages where the noise buries the signal.

And the most infuriating thing about email is that you do all the work. You sort. You search. You mark as unread so you can reply later (which you likely will never do). It’s an endless to-do list flooded by messages that are important to the sender (or marketer), but rarely useful to you. Every other category of consumer software — maps, photos, music, payments — has been rethought around what makes our lives easier. Email is the last category remaining still rooted in the 1980s.

What if email ran your life without ruining it?

Naveen Gavini (opens in new tab), Steven Ramkumar (opens in new tab), and Albert Pereta (opens in new tab) at BuildForever (opens in new tab) recognized that it’s finally possible for email to be reinvented to work for you.

Today, the team has launched Extra (opens in new tab): the inbox for your life, available now on iOS and desktop (opens in new tab). Extra understands your life through your email and takes the work out of it. It goes beyond summarization, grouping themes and projects that are important to you and helps you take the next set of actions.

Visually, the product feels nothing like a list of messages. Newsletters become a browseable custom newspaper. Shipping updates become a package tracker with a progress bar. Marketing emails aren't subject lines anymore, they're a visual shopping feed. Event invitations appear in a calendar view. Extra works the way email always should have.

The difference is structural. Email shows you what arrived. Extra shows you what matters and helps you take the next step.

For the small group of beta testers, the app's Today view has condensed over 4 million emails into single daily summaries, so users never have to open any of them individually. They’ve collectively unsubscribed from receiving over 2 million emails a year. The average traditional email session lasts 23 seconds of anxious scanning; the average Extra session is much longer because people are immersed in their inbox for the first time, with the right information presented in the right way.

I’ve fully replaced Gmail on my phone. All of my personal accounts — family, kids' school, finances — run through Extra now. It surfaces when my tax documents arrive, when the school sends a notice, when something actually requires my attention. I don't label anything. I don't search for anything. There’s no anxiety-inducing red counter of unread messages.

Consumer investing is hard, but investing in Extra was easy

I’ve always thought that consumer investing is hard (opens in new tab). Preferences are fickle, distribution is expensive, big platforms copy anything that works, and retention is brutal. But for the rare consumer company that succeeds, the potential is massive.

Extra was the first pitch I ever saw as a VC, and I instantly saw in the meeting that they checked all the boxes. They were addressing a universal need around communication, and their founding team had exceptional product taste and was obsessed with fixing one of the biggest consumer pain points. AI is finally good enough to uplevel email from messages into what’s relevant to each person. The product will get better as more of your friends are on Extra, and the product is easy to understand and immediately sparks joy. From that first meeting, this team had our full support, and we are proud Seed investors.

I love that Naveen, Albert, and Steven decided the company behind Extra should be named BuildForever. It's a genuine reflection of how they operate. These are people who would rather ship something great than talk about shipping something great. They’re taking the Pinterest playbook and building for people outside the Silicon Valley bubble, and they’re already building traction on college campuses with students. Every major consumer company – Facebook, TikTok, even LinkedIn – has focused first on the next generation of users.

We’re excited that so many angel investors are as excited as we are about Extra: Paul Buchheit (creator of Gmail), Fidji Simo (CEO of AGI Deployment at OpenAI), Shishir Mehrotra (CEO of Superhuman), Scott Belsky (founder of Behance), Guillermo Rauch (founder of Vercel), Shreya Murthy (co-founder of Partiful), and Pinterest co-founders Evan Sharp and Ben Silbermann.

Email has waited forty years for a team that would rebuild it from the ground up rather than bolt another feature onto what already exists. BuildForever is that team, and Extra is the product.