Former Pinterest team redesigns email with Extra — and it’s actually good

When was the last time you were actually excited about email? If you’re older, probably back in 2004, when Gmail was rolling out its first beta invites. If you’re younger, probably never. Over the years, numerous startups have tried and failed to reinvent it, with the most successful ones simply bolting new functionality — like improved workflows or AI agents — onto the same basic inbox.

Today, a new company built by a team of former Pinterest designers and engineers is rethinking what an inbox can be from the ground up. And you might actually find this one exciting.

Extra, the first product from the consumer technology company BuildForever, ditches subject lines, folders, and tags in favor of an inbox organized around your life — bringing everything important into a single, actionable overview within its “Today” tab. This tab updates in real time with the most current and critical information extracted from the mountains of email in your inbox.

The rest of your inbox is then automatically organized into custom categories that become tabs, reflecting your life as determined by what’s already in your inbox. That means you could have tabs for family activities, travel plans, finances, newsletters, and more. The result of this reimagined inbox is a uniquely personalized experience — and one where you finally feel like you have a shot at staying on top of it all.

The idea, like many in the consumer space, emerged from a personal problem the founder wanted to solve: His inbox was a mess.

“I was a religious inbox zero person by day [at work] … you’re just constantly checking this email. And then I would open up my personal email, and it was just this wall of to-dos. And with all the junk in there, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, where do I begin?’” explains BuildForever co-founder and CEO, Naveen Gavini, a former SVP and chief product officer at Pinterest who worked at the consumer tech company for nearly 12 years.

“Honestly, after 12 hours of email all day, I didn’t have the energy, so I just quit.”

The result, he tells TechCrunch, was missed messages, unintentionally ghosted friends, and a general sense of being buried. The problem, he believes, is structural: As emails pile up, the important ones simply fall off the page and into oblivion.

Extra attempts to change this paradigm with an entirely new interface for email, and, under the hood, AI intelligence. Notably, though, the team is not pitching Extra as an AI app, and that’s intentional.

“I think, in Silicon Valley, people are very deep in [AI], but I think the average person doesn’t even know where to start,” says Gavini. “When you mention AI, it kind of feels a little ‘power, user-y.’ But also, I just think that there are so many companies that are promising to be the AI personal assistant for your life. And I think people don’t really need that. People just want some of these basic problems solved,” he says.

“That’s what we’re focused on — solving those user problems, versus pitching the next AI that can do everything.”

And yet, a product like Extra couldn’t exist if it weren’t for the AI technology that quietly learns, understands, and then organizes your inbox for you. On top of that background intelligence, there’s even an AI assistant you can talk to for help finding emails, unsubscribing, replying with your voice, and more.

Instead of starting in a traditional inbox interface, in Extra, you begin on the “Today” view. This page represents everything going on in your inbox that you should care about, and it’s organized into categories of what needs action, what’s happening today, and what’s “good to know.” You can treat the actionable items like a to-do list, where you can swipe to clear the item when it’s completed.

For each action item, Extra tries to predict the next steps you’ll need to take and then highlights them for you, whether it’s a file you need to open and review, a link you need to click, or anything else.

Below that are the “Good to Know” items, like order and shipment confirmations, test results from your last doctor’s appointment, and a curated selection of news headlines from your newsletters in a daily news brief.

At the bottom of the Today tab is the “Daily Cleanup” section, where Extra lets you review the low-priority emails that have cluttered your inbox and lets you take action. From here, you can choose to unsubscribe from marketing emails and updates you don’t want, and Extra also offers the option to delete all the emails from that sender from your inbox, which saves you storage space.

Otherwise, you can just mark the emails as done to archive them, which is also reflected in your Gmail. (For now, Extra works with Gmail only, but that could change in the future. The company may possibly offer its own email addresses at some point.)

In addition to the daily brief section on the Today tab, newsletter subscribers will have a place to browse their favorite writers’ headlines within a dedicated “News” tab. Here, Extra uses wide images, headlines, and snippets to encourage you to read the full article, much like the Apple News app would.

An “Events” tab pulls out not only your own appointments and plans from your email, but also suggests events you might like to add to your calendar — such as local happenings surfaced through local newsletters or emails from venues or other organizations. And if you add something from these suggestions to your personal calendar, Extra will understand the next step — like buying tickets for the upcoming concert — and suggest that action.

The “Shop” tab, meanwhile, reimagines shopping-related emails as a curated storefront of interesting finds, rather than unwanted clutter. Extra uses product photos alongside promotion details to gain your attention.

“We actually go through your emails and shopping, and extract the products themselves … And this is a really big difference for brands,” explains Gavini. Typically, there’s a very low likelihood that you would see a brand’s email, he says, because Gmail buries them in its own Promotions tab. But since these are the brands you want to hear from, Extra presents the information in a more attractive, more visual format that actually entices you to shop.

“What we found is [that] giving people control of their inbox allows them to decide what they want to receive, and then they can receive it in the most native and best format to consume it,” Gavini notes.

The other tabs in Extra’s app will be unique to you, allowing you a place to peruse and archive emails tailored to your own life and activities, intelligently organized on your behalf. (There is a traditional “inbox” view if you need it — but you can also move that one to the end of the row if you find it’s no longer useful.)

Extra’s beta testers have now collectively unsubscribed from over 2 million emails per year, and over 4 million emails have been transformed into “Today” view summaries, the company says.

Extra is now launching its app on iOS and web to those on its waitlist who will be able to invite others using special codes.

Email that’s … fun to use?

In TechCrunch’s initial tests, we were surprised to find an already well-polished product, given its beta status at the time. The app has been thoughtfully designed, is easy to use, and — dare I say it? — it makes checking your inbox an almost delightful experience. (I’m as shocked as you are, trust me.)

I am truly deriving such joy from unsubscribing from all the junk cluttering my inbox and wiping out all the emails from the spammer marketer in the process. I feel accomplished as I mark my to-dos as done. I’m discovering concerts I want to see and new products I want to buy. I’m keeping up with things I would have normally missed. It’s what email could have been doing for me all along, had it not been designed by a bunch of engineers who spent their time debating the perfect shade of blue for links.

There is some room for improvement, but my feedback so far has focused on small tweaks, not major issues.

BuildForever was co-founded by Steven Ramkumar and Albert Pereta, both of whom also spent over a decade at Pinterest. The broader idea is to combine their engineering and design talent to fix top consumer apps, starting with email.

“If we could bring the same sort of design and thought process of Pinterest — which is delight, joy, and inspiration — to something that feels so anxiety-inducing and boring as email, that was our goal,” Gavini says.

The company hopes to expand its approach to other products over time, potentially including messaging, calendars, contacts, and others.

BuildForever is backed by $9.5 million in seed funding led by Abstract, A* (Kevin Hartz), Felicis, and Elad Gil. Other angel investors include Pinterest co-founders Ben Silbermann and Evan Sharp; Gmail creator Paul Buchheit; OpenAI applications CEO Fidji Simo; Superhuman CEO Shishir Mehrotra; Pinterest and Coinbase board member Gokul Rajaram; A24 partner Scott Belsky; Partiful CEO Shreya Murthy; Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch; and others.

Extra is free to use and will remain free, with monetization planned for a later point. It’s available on the web and on iOS.