A recently moved startup from New Zealand is working on world’s first smart inbox assistant

It works 24/7/365, never gets sick or tired, doesn’t have an attitude and never asks for a raise.

Founder of Unified Inbox, which recently made Singapore its international headquarters, is working on an algorithm that could potentially power the world’s first smart inbox assistant. This innovation could help to screen your calls and messages, sort your mail, and help manage your time.

Founded by Toby Ruckert, Unified Inbox wants to bring anyone's own Personal Executive Assistant who does all the management of calls and messages and more with the touch of a screen.

The cloud-based unified communication & social collaboration platform, centralizes external conversations, social engagement and internal team collaboration into one single experience across desktop and mobile devices. Given the amount of messages sent through and received from various channels, Unified Inbox want to help users manage their digital lives.

"While still in its closed beta phase, Unified Inbox has already secured top tier telecommunication companies, ISP and media partners for a global market roll out in 2015 as they see the huge potential of this Communication-as-a-Service platform as a simple, yet highly effective way of users taking control of our communications flow across email, Twitter, LinkedIn, or SMS," said Toby.

Unified Inbox, has several cloud solutions focused around unification and collaboration, which work cross-platform. Their first offering is a Unified Inbox mobile app, which allows users to manage all their incoming and outgoing messages centrally from within one interface. It has embraced the idea of simply “Getting Things Done” and aim towards better productivity of the information worker.

"It is designed to be a personal inbox management assistant, enabling its users to respond faster, more efficiently and build better business relationships improving their ability to connect with prospects, customers and other internal departments across multiple channels and devices from one single place. With functions like Swipe to Archive or Delete, Task-Delegation, Message Distribution or Deferring of messages by simple gestures, Unified Inbox gears up to become the future inbox management solution – no matter what the source of the message," Toby said.

Toby said that developing the platform took some time considering the complex nature of combining various communication channels and messaging protocols, with the first prototype having taken nearly three years to develop. He bootstrapped the company for three years before Markus Lehnert, the former Head of Strategy / M&A at a large European software company saw Unified Inbox’s potential and joined Toby as first investor and became a co-founder.

"Unified Inbox, has attracted further investment and government grants, allowing the company to complete its products and form its core team. Unified Inbox is now backed by internationally independent investors and looking to raise further funds for its expansion into the region," Toby said.

Currently, they are looking for information workers (professional individuals, SMBs or teams in larger enterprises with between 5-100 people) to trial our solution and provide market feedback.

The founder

Toby was born in 1977 and raised in Germany. He immigrated to New Zealand before travelling mostly in India, China and Europe.

He has a music degree and ventured into IT while still at school by doing part-time software testing for IBM. He then started a couple of e-commerce companies while still studying at university before coming up with the concept of Unified Inbox. He began developing the idea for Unified Inbox since 2010, after encountering the difficulty of keeping up with both internal and external communications while running his existing ventures across different locations and time zones.

According to Toby, initially, it was simply a matter of scratching your own itch. The online shops he had founded were getting emails, sms, phone calls, facebook and twitter messages from customers, suppliers and other business partners alike. There was no central overview to see all communication in one place and work together on those messages as a team. Later, they found that once you’ve got all in one place, you really want your personal executive assistant to manage it all. And this is what Unified Inbox is ultimately turning into.”

“Unified Inbox, provides a complete overview of all incoming and outgoing messages for a single person or an entire business, making it easy to be compliant on social media, achieve secure and complete backup across different channels and empowering information workers with better productivity with features like Unified Search, Unified Conversations or the concept of the “5 D’s”

With the increasing volume of communication and channels, media breaks have become the norm and it’s now nearly impossible to keep up with every conversation we’re involved in. With smart services such as InboxRank® and LifeModes®, Unified Inbox is getting ready to become your personal executive assistant to help you manage your inbox and digital life better," Toby said.

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COMPANY PROFILE

Name of the Company: Unified Inbox
Founder/CEO: Toby Ruckert
Website: www.unifiedinbox.com
Source of funding: Private investors (New Zealand, Singapore, India, Europe)
Start of operation: 2008, + Team 2010, + Beta 2012 + Headquarter (SG): 2014
 

For startups wanting to be featured, send your message to Lee Anne Babierra at [email protected]