The start-up developing an alternative to emails

“The way we manage work, principally through email, needs to change. We allow really complicated parts of the global economy to be run over email and it’s not fit for purpose.” says Bill Dobie, who has founded a new workplace communications startup called Sedna, to rival already established Slack.

Sedna has just secured a £10m Series A round, led by Chalfen Ventures and Stride VC, to develop Dobie’s alternative, which promises to reduce inbound messages by up to 95%.

Founded in 2017, there are approximately 2,000 teams in 80 countries who use Sedna. The company markets itself as the antithesis of email, however, Sedna accepts that email is so universally used, that any new service needs to incorporate the old one. Essentially, Sedna works by putting all of a company’s emails into one stream and then using an API to channel them to exactly the right people.

Dobie explains:

Information about transactions a company makes is rooted in emails. People want to move more quickly and be certain about the information they use, but the information is in individual email accounts. Our thesis is that the content of a company related to its work should be available to everyone in the business who’s entitled to see it, so Sedna works by taking emails and connecting them into a single datastream, so there’s one timeline for a transaction that everyone can access.”

Dobie also says that commodity industries are perfect use cases for the Sedna software as they are businesses performing complex transactions with multiple people across a wide geographical sphere – like a shipping company. Coronavirus has made every company look more like a shipping company as everyone is now working in a remote fashion.

Harry Stebbings, who led Sedna’s latest round, says:

I think this could fundamentally change how some of the biggest companies in the world transact and communicate,” he says. “I don’t think it’s impossible to see a $10bn opportunity with Sedna, especially when you look at things like Slack and how well that’s done.”