Our vision is to build innovative email software for new platforms that’s designed for how we live today, adapting the technology to people, not the other way around.

Birdseye is meant to reduce the clutter around an email inbox. It allows people to sort and prioritize their email by peeking into each letter before opening it – much in the way that one used to check the old-fashioned physical mailbox. Seeing your email instead of having to sift through plain words allows one to quickly sort it into categories – junk, letters, bills, etc.

Birdseye is a version 1.0 product, past Alpha and Beta stages, launched in-market, growing but with much more to build out to achieve our vision. It had 25,000 downloads on day one with 500 active users each day, growing by 25% each week one month into its launch. Most products take time to grow, and we are focused on the growth of active users at this stage -- which is very high.

Email is a complicated problem both technically and behaviourally. Email needs to work all the time and can never have “down time,” given how much people rely on it. Birdseye solves the problem of a cluttered and unreadable inbox. It actually makes looking at email content on a big screen enjoyable, and is a completely new innovation, created so that individuals may have a more pleasant emailing experience.

Birdseye has received a huge reaction from the investment community due to excitement of new products in the email space. We have had a seven-figure market valuation for the product and are raising a “Seed Plus” round of financing. Our investors include a venture capital firm, a global email company and a series of top angel investors.

Birdseye controls part of the technology stack, but not all of it: the back-end server and front-end app interface is Birdseye, but users use their own email account logins and we leverage those services’ protocols in our app.

We had to build Birdseye to work with multiple email systems. We started with Gmail but are extending to Yahoo, Hotmail, Exchange, IMAP, etc, each with their own protocols. We also are extending to Android and Windows, which each require ground up development. We have used Open Graph protocol for the first time in email to allow publishers to create custom display formats and quick actions for different emails in Birdseye.

Next up is a series of new features: a “Heads Up Display” that will display useful information about your Inbox and how you use it, more custom actions to quickly deal with email, Newsletter View to actually read all those newsletters you signed up for, and a Social Layer: integrating more with Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Dropbox and Google Apps.

With the significant capital investment by external venture capitalists and angel investors we have a 12-18 month runway and product roadmap. We plan to build more features, extend to more platforms like TVs and Android, expand our distribution and user base, and begin to test our monetization plans. Our intent is to grow Birdseye into a revenue generating business by year two, but we could also see a potential exit to a larger global email service provider.

Our hope is that Birdseye email viewing will catch up with the boring, old-fashioned way of reading email, and allow people to do it more efficiently.

Key dates:

- “Lean Product Plan” was put together in early Summer 2012 and greenlit by the Board of Directors

- Visual Design completed late Summer 2012.

- iOS and Back-end development was done in Fall 2012.

- App Launched publicly in the App Store in February 2013