Tuesday, August 16, 2011

PowerInbox moving to Cambridge, opens email app to the public

By Rodney H. Brown

PowerInbox, a startup born in Florida, has relocated to the area, operating out of the Cambridge offices of its main investor, Atlas Venture, which led its recent $1.1 million funding round. The company will soon be moving to new digs at 129 Franklin St. in Cambridge, and also today announced it opened up its enhanced email inbox service to the public for the first time.

The company’s technology allows any notification email from an outside website like Groupon or Facebook to be seen inside the body of your email, instead of having to click on a link in the email and launch a web browser to go to the site. PowerInbox runs as an application inside the email client, and currently works with web-based email such as Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail, according to the company, which said that Outlook is “coming soon.”

In addition to Atlas, PowerInbox raised the $1.1 million seed round from Longworth Ventures, Correlation Ventures, and angels Alan Phillips, Chris Lynch, Joe Caruso, Leslie Murdock, Mark Rose and Mike Santullo. News of the funding was first reported in June in the Innovation Economy blog at Boston.com. 

According to a representative from Atlas, PowerInbox is looking for its own office space in the Greater Boston area. The company was started in Orlando by CEO Matt Thazhmon, who was considering a move to San Francisco when Jeff Fagnan of Atlas met with him and convinced him to relocate the startup to Boston, the Boston.com story states.