Do you know Asana, a collaborative work platform founded by former Google and Facebook employees? The Parisian startup Upstream announces a fundraising of 3 million dollars from Y Combinator, Connect Ventures and around thirty entrepreneurs from notably Algolia, Asana, Framer, Webflow and Alan. Behind this funding lies a thesis that goes against the grain of twenty years of innovation in collaborative software: email has not disappeared and could even become one of the most important infrastructures of the era of AI agents.
Since the beginning of the 2010s, a succession of actors have promised the end of email. First corporate social networks, then Slack, Microsoft Teams or more recently Discord have all defended the same vision: to replace technology deemed slow, rigid and unsuitable for new ways of working.
The results are more nuanced, although instant messaging has established itself in internal exchanges, email remains the main communication protocol between companies. Contracts, applications, customer requests, commercial exchanges, invoices, discussions with partners, suppliers or investors continue to pass through it daily.
For Louis Lecat, co-founder and CEO of Upstream, this reality is precisely the starting point of the company. “It was 11 p.m. The children were sleeping. My wife was in bed. And I was still in my mailbox. » Former product manager at Asana then product manager at Algolia, he then supervised twelve product teams and more than twenty product managers. Despite this organization, an increasing part of his time was devoted to sorting messages, searching for context, following up with people or coordinating actions between different teams. “I had become my own assistant,” he sums up.
This observation is far from isolated. According to several studies devoted to knowledge work, executives now devote a significant part of their time to coordination tasks rather than to their core business. As businesses have increased digital tools, they have also increased the volume of information to process, share and contextualize.
It is precisely in this area that Upstream intends to position itself, the startup is developing what it presents as the first mailbox designed for humans and artificial intelligence agents. Unlike the assistants integrated into traditional email clients, which are generally limited to writing responses or summarizing conversations, Upstream seeks to transform the inbox into a shared work environment.
The platform can identify messages that really require action, prepare responses in the user’s editorial style, send reminders, find information in previous exchanges, organize meetings or even coordinate several stakeholders around the same file.
Several thousand users have already tested the product during its private beta phase. Some say they have reduced the daily time spent managing their inbox from more than an hour to around fifteen minutes. But beyond the productivity gain, Upstream defends a more ambitious vision of work assisted by artificial intelligence.
“The future of work is not one person with one assistant. These are teams of people and teams of agents working together,” estimates Louis Lecat.
This approach reflects the current evolution of the generative AI market. After an initial phase focused on the models themselves, players in the sector are now interested in their integration into companies’ operational processes. The question is no longer just whether artificial intelligence can produce a text or answer a question. It consists of determining how several agents can collaborate with several human collaborators within the same workflow.
From this perspective, email has several advantages that are rarely highlighted. It already constitutes a particularly rich context database. Each conversation contains decisions, responsibilities, negotiations, documents and exchanges that structure the daily activity of organizations.
As AI models become accessible to an increasing number of actors, value could gradually shift to environments that can provide this context to agents. The inbox could then become a strategic entry point for new generations of professional software.
This reading partly explains investor interest in Upstream. The roundtable brings together Koen Bok and Jorn van Dijk, founders of Framer, Nicolas Dessaigne and Julien Lemoine, co-founders of Algolia, Linda Tong, CEO of Webflow, Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve and Charles Gorintin, co-founders of Alan, as well as Roxanne Varza and several leaders from the European technology ecosystem.
The funds raised should allow the company to accelerate the development of its platform, extend its integrations and continue building a product inspired by new software references such as Linear, Arc or Granola.
For the enterprise software industry, the emergence of players like Upstream is above all a signal. Artificial intelligence does not necessarily create new uses. It sometimes leads to rediscovering existing infrastructures and assigning them a new function.
Not only has email survived all attempts to replace it, but the arrival of AI agents could give it a second life.
