JB Bakst is the founder and CEO of Chief, an AI email agent he pitches as 'the first inbox with good judgment.' A Stanford computer science grad and Manhattan native now based in Los Angeles, he cut his teeth as an early engineer at Airtable - where he obsessed over fun, delightful productivity UX - after starting out building iOS and full-stack at the six-person video-messaging startup Chime. His thesis for Chief: your email is a 12-year record of how you actually make decisions, so software should play those decisions forward rather than dump everything in a feed.
beehiiv is a newsletter platform founded by ex-Morning Brew engineers. It provides an all-in-one infrastructure for creators and publishers to build, grow, and monetize newsletters, websites, and podcasts. Unlike competitors like Substack, beehiiv does not take a revenue cut from creator subscriptions, instead monetizing through flat SaaS fees and its native ad network. It powers over 130,000 newsletters and generates over $30M in annual revenue.
Close is a bootstrapped, profitable sales CRM built for small and mid-sized teams that want to spend less time on admin and more time actually selling. Founded in 2013 out of a San Francisco sales agency, it combines pipeline management, built-in calling, email, and SMS into one platform - no integrations required. With $17M+ ARR and a fully remote team across 40+ countries, Close has grown almost entirely without venture capital, making it one of the more unusual success stories in SaaS.
Front is a customer service platform that unifies email, chat, SMS, social and voice into one collaborative workspace. It looks like an inbox, behaves like a help desk, and adds AI on top so teams can answer faster without losing the human voice their customers hired them for.
Zuni (by Old House Labs Inc.) is a Chrome sidebar AI copilot built for knowledge workers who refuse to leave their existing tools. Rather than forcing users into yet another chat interface, Zuni sits quietly in the browser sidebar, reads the open tab, understands the Gmail inbox, and surfaces actionable intelligence in real time. Founded in 2024 by Cambridge alumni George Seabridge and Will Taylor (a 2x YC founder), Zuni is backed by Y Combinator (S24) and offers access to the world's leading AI models — GPT-4o, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Gemini 2.0 Flash, DeepSeek R1, and more — all in one place, without switching apps.
Rahul Vohra is a British-Indian entrepreneur and the founder of Superhuman, the cult-favorite AI email client acquired by Grammarly in July 2025. He pioneered the quantitative product-market fit framework that became the most-shared article in First Round Review history, and applied video game design principles to productivity software. Before Superhuman, he co-founded Rapportive (sold to LinkedIn in 2012) and coded RuneScape's legendary 'Monkey Madness I' quest as a 21-year-old intern. He also co-runs Todd & Rahul Capital, a $50M+ angel fund with 120+ portfolio companies.
Zero is an AI-native email client built from scratch to put artificial intelligence at the center of how people read, write, and manage email. Founded in 2025 by Nizar Abi Zaher and Adam Wazzan, Zero went through Y Combinator's X25 batch and raised $2M from 1984 Ventures, Pioneer Fund, and YC. The product lives at 0.email and promises to cut the time knowledge workers spend on email by 70% through smart prioritization, thread summarization, AI-drafted replies, and conversational inbox search. With over 10,000 GitHub stars on its open-source repo, Zero is one of the fastest-growing AI email projects of 2025.
Streak is a CRM platform built entirely inside Gmail, enabling sales, recruiting, fundraising, and support teams to manage pipelines, contacts, and workflows without leaving their inbox. Founded in 2011 by ex-Googlers Aleem Mawani and Omar Ismail through Y Combinator, Streak has grown to 750,000+ users and ~$10M ARR while remaining lean (~35 employees) and profitable — having raised only $1.9M and never pursued follow-on venture funding. It is Google's G Suite Technology Partner of the Year and one of the most capital-efficient CRM companies in the market.
After 20 years of immutable Gmail usernames, Google finally rolled out the ability for personal @gmail.com users to change their email address — keeping all data intact while converting the old address into a permanent alias. The feature launched in the U.S. in March 2026 after being spotted in Hindi support documentation in December 2025, marking the biggest identity infrastructure change in Gmail's history.