Y Combinator startup Scape emerges from stealth with $3.2M to rethink email
Tech.eu Cate Lawrence
Two young Swedish founders just raised $3.2M to rebuild email around AI, not another Gmail plugin. It drafts replies, fills forms, and files attachments before you even open the thread.
Based on reporting by Tech.eu, Cate Lawrence — read the original for the full story.
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Email hasn't meaningfully changed in a quarter-century, and Scape is betting that's exactly the problem worth solving. The Stockholm startup, founded by 23-year-olds Melvin Hagberg and Elis Hodzic, came out of stealth today with $3.2 million in funding from Y Combinator, General Catalyst, and FundersClub, plus angels including Legora's Max Junestrand and former Spotify CMO Sophia Bendz.
The pitch is narrow and specific: most of what looks like "answering an email" is actually busywork. You dig through old threads for context, hunt down meeting notes, fill out a form in some other tool, upload it, then finally write the reply. Scape wants to compress all of that into one click by drafting the response, and sometimes the attachment, before you even open the message.
Hagberg started the company solo in YC's summer 2024 batch, originally building a customer-support tool for email. He pivoted after realizing the same underlying tech solved his own inbox headaches better than it solved anyone else's support tickets. Hodzic, who first backed Scape as an angel investor, joined as co-founder this year. The product now runs a local meeting notetaker and continuously studies a user's inbox so its drafts actually reflect what was discussed and agreed upon, not generic templates.
Visually, Scape still resembles a normal inbox, which seems intentional. Instead of dumping everything into one feed, it sorts messages into custom labels like Customers or Hiring, buries newsletters and notifications by default, and surfaces only what genuinely needs a human decision. YC partner Gustaf Alströmer, an early investor, put it bluntly: people who try it stop going back to Gmail.
The team is five people in Stockholm right now, hiring across engineering and product, with early access open at scape.app. Whether that claim holds beyond a small group of enthusiastic early users is the real test, but the framing is smart. Scape isn't selling a chatbot bolted onto email. It's selling an inbox that already assumes you're too busy to write the email yourself.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Every few years someone tries to reinvent email and most of them die quietly because the actual barrier isn't UI, it's habit and trust in someone else drafting your words. Scape's advantage is that it's not asking anyone to leave Gmail's mental model, just to stop doing the annoying parts, which is a much smaller behavioral ask than past attempts at email 2.0. I'd bet its survival depends less on the AI drafting quality and more on whether enterprise IT departments let a third party read every meeting and thread that flows through it.
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