You may have recently read a TechCrunch and/or Mashable article about Contactually, the CRM tool that allows you to stay connected with your contacts without leaving your mailbox. Looks like this sleekly integrated CRM/Email concept is resonating with audiences – they’ve just graduated from 500 Startups and they’re getting all kinds of press coverage and handling a huge amount of invite requests.
We’re big fans of this startup and have been in talks with Zvi Band, Contactually’s founder, and the rest of his team, for several months now.
Zvi stumbled across Context.IO in August and signed up to take a look under the hood. Although he had already built out a preliminary Gmail layer for Contactually, Zvi reached out to discuss our take on email as a data source and what our plans as a company were. In a stroke of luck, our roadmap looked like it was going to solve several of the issues Zvi anticipated facing with Contactually over the coming months.
We initially connected with the Contactually team in August, when v2.0 of our API was still in beta. At that time, Zvi was concerned about the scalability, reliability and speed of his existing Gmail layer for Contactually, and these were precisely the issues we were looking at strengthening with v2.0 of the Context.IO API. Down the road, Zvi is looking to expand into use cases outside of IMAP to cover a broader segment of business mailboxes. The next big item on Context.IO’s roadmap is Exchange support, which will allow a large segment of enterprise mailboxes to be integrated into business applications. The partnership became obvious, and we’ve been working together ever since.
Instead of continuing to build directly on IMAP, Contactually saved days of precious development time while working around the clock to prepare for 500 Startups demo day. We can’t wait to see what’s next for this awesome team!
