Email hasn't fundamentally changed since the late 1990s — but the volume, complexity, and coordination burden it carries certainly has. Scape, a Stockholm-based startup, is betting that the interface itself is the problem, not just the volume. Today, the company emerges from stealth with a $3.2 million raise and a publicly available early-access product at scape.app.
The Funding and the Team
The round was led by Y Combinator, with participation from General Catalyst and FundersClub. Notable angel investors include:
- Max Junestrand, co-founder of Legora
- Sebastian Knutsson, co-founder of King
- Jacob Wallenberg Jr. (Ramp and EQT)
- Sophia Bendz, former CMO at Spotify
- Operators from OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Ramp
Scape was founded by Melvin Hagberg, who joined Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch as a 21-year-old solo founder. The company originally launched as a customer support tool for email before Hagberg recognized the underlying problem was universal — not just for support teams, but for any professional living in their inbox. Elis Hodzic, 23, joined as co-founder in 2025 after initially backing the company as an angel investor. The team is currently five people, all based in Stockholm, with plans to expand across engineering and product.
What Scape Actually Does
On the surface, Scape looks like a conventional inbox — but the product is designed to do a significant portion of email work proactively, before you even open a thread.
The core experience works like this:
- Inbox triage: Only emails that require action are surfaced. Notifications, newsletters, and low-priority messages are hidden by default.
- Custom labels: Users organize around categories like Customers or Hiring to prioritize accordingly.
- Pre-drafted responses: When you open a thread, Scape has already drafted a reply — contextually informed by your full email history and meeting notes.
- Attachment handling: Drafts can include attachments Scape has created or edited on your behalf.
- Local meeting notetaker: A built-in, on-device notetaker feeds meeting context back into the inbox, so responses reflect what was actually agreed.
The pitch is that the friction between deciding what to say and actually sending the email — which currently involves reading old threads, cross-referencing notes, filling out forms in other tools, uploading files — collapses into a single review-and-send action.
Why This Matters Now
Email-focused AI tools have proliferated in the past two years, from plugins like Superhuman's AI features to ChatGPT's various integrations. But most of them sit on top of Gmail or Outlook rather than replacing the interface entirely. Scape's architectural decision to build a standalone inbox — rather than a plugin — is deliberate.
"Our bet is simple: email is where most professionals get their work done. They don't need another chatbot or Gmail plugin; they need an interface purpose-built for work that happens in email." — Melvin Hagberg, co-founder and CEO, Scape
That view has buy-in from Y Combinator's own partnership. Gustaf Alströmer, General Partner at YC, was an early investor:
"It's painfully obvious that AI will transform email. While I've seen hundreds of startups try to innovate in the space over the years, I've seen nothing like the team behind Scape. Once people start using the product, they just don't go back to Gmail."
Implications for Founders and Operators
For startup founders and operators, the relevant signal here isn't just a new email tool — it's a broader pattern. The interfaces professionals use most (email, calendar, documents) are becoming primary targets for AI-native redesign, not just AI-assisted augmentation. Tools that sit on top of Gmail face an inherent ceiling; tools that replace the layer have more surface area to work with, but face a steeper adoption hurdle.
Scape's local-first meeting notetaker is also worth noting: processing context on-device addresses privacy concerns that have slowed enterprise adoption of AI email tools, and could be a meaningful differentiator as the category matures.
