Ex-Pinterest Team Launches Improved Email App Extra

When was the last time you felt genuine enthusiasm for your email client? For many, that moment faded with the novelty of early Gmail, leaving a decades-long void filled by incremental updates and cluttered interfaces. A new venture from a team of former Pinterest leaders is challenging that stagnation with a fundamental reimagining of the inbox, aiming to transform a source of daily stress into a tool of clarity and control.

The app, called Extra, is the debut product from the company BuildForever. It discards conventional elements like subject lines and folders, structuring your digital life around a dynamic Today tab. This central hub provides a real-time, actionable overview by extracting the most critical information from your messages. The remaining emails are automatically sorted into personalized categories that reflect your actual life, such as family, travel, finances, or newsletters. This creates a uniquely tailored experience where users can finally feel on top of their correspondence.

The inspiration came from a personal pain point. BuildForever’s co-founder and CEO, Naveen Gavini, a former SVP at Pinterest, found his personal inbox utterly unmanageable. “I was a religious inbox zero person by day at work, but my personal email was just a wall of to-dos and junk,” he explains. The overwhelming clutter led to missed messages and a sense of being perpetually buried. He identified a structural flaw: as emails accumulate, vital information simply disappears from view.

Extra addresses this with a completely new interface powered by intelligent, background AI. Notably, the team avoids marketing it primarily as an AI application. “When you mention AI, it feels a little ‘power user-y,’” says Gavini. “People just want these basic problems solved. That’s what we’re focused on, versus pitching the next AI that can do everything.” Nevertheless, the technology is essential, quietly learning and organizing your inbox while offering an optional assistant for tasks like finding emails or unsubscribing.

The experience begins on the Today view, which categorizes items into what needs action, what’s happening now, and what’s simply good to know. Actionable items function like a to-do list, and Extra predicts next steps, highlighting necessary links or files. The “Good to Know” section surfaces useful information like shipping confirmations or a curated news brief from your subscriptions. A Daily Cleanup area helps users swiftly unsubscribe from unwanted senders and free up storage space by bulk-deleting their emails.

Beyond the Today tab, a dedicated News tab presents newsletter content in an engaging, visual format reminiscent of Apple News. An Events tab extracts appointments and even suggests local happenings from your emails, prompting follow-up actions like buying tickets. The Shop tab reimagines promotional emails as a curated storefront, displaying products with images and details to create a more appealing shopping experience. “Giving people control allows them to receive information in the best format to consume it,” Gavini notes.

All other tabs are uniquely generated for each user, organizing emails around their specific life activities. The company reports that beta testers have already unsubscribed from over two million emails annually, with millions more transformed into Today view summaries. Extra is now launching from its waitlist on iOS and web.

In early use, the app feels surprisingly polished and thoughtfully designed. The act of unsubscribing from clutter or marking off to-dos delivers a tangible sense of accomplishment. Discovering events or products becomes seamless, highlighting what email could have been all along. While there is room for minor tweaks, the core experience is robust.

BuildForever was co-founded by Steven Ramkumar and Albert Pereta, also Pinterest veterans. Their mission is to apply a Pinterest-like philosophy of delight and inspiration to mundane but essential apps. “If we could bring that to something as anxiety-inducing as email, that was our goal,” Gavini states. The company plans to expand this approach to other areas like messaging and calendars.

The startup is backed by $9.5 million in seed funding from investors including Abstract, A*, Felicis, and Elad Gil, with angels like Pinterest co-founders Ben Silbermann and Evan Sharp, and Gmail creator Paul Bucheit. Extra is free to use and will remain so, with monetization strategies to be introduced later.