cross pond high tech

U.S. startups have traditionally had access to far higher levels of investment, giving them a head start when it comes to research and development and making it easier to attract to its shores the very best talent.

Yet the arms race is becoming closer. According to Dow-Jones VentureSource, the second quarter of 2014 saw over €2.1 billion ($2.4 billion at the current conversion rate) raised by European startups — the highest quarterly total since 2001. (For comparison’s sake, the figure for U.S.-based startups in that period was $13.8 billion.)

Encouraged by the success of European tech firms such as Shazam and Transferwise — both of which made valuations of billion dollars in early 2015 — more U.S. money is crossing the pond.

There is also an increasing confidence in investors that Europe has the talent pool to thrive, and there has not been an irreparable “brain drain” to Silicon Valley.

Email has long been the scourge of many office places, with inboxes often resembling warzones of unread messages, stars and tags, missing attachments, and all around chaos around next steps for each item. These problems are only exacerbated when multiple people are included on an email chain.

Front is a shared inbox and collaboration platform for enterprise email that looks to solve many of these problems. Today, the Summer 2014 Y Combinator grad announced $3.1 million in Seed funding in a round led by SoftTech VC, with participation from BOLDStart, Point Nine Capital and Caffeinated Capital. The formerly Parisian company is now permanently headquartered in the Bay Area.

“Email is great, but it was invented for one-to-one communication,” says Front co-founder and CEO Mathilde Collin. “Unfortunately, email is regularly used for one-to-many, and many-to-one communication. We wanted to make email useful again for companies.”