The quest to kill Gmail finds a new AI challenger

• Scape raised $3.2 million to rebuild the email inbox with AI agents.
• Its desktop app draws on its memory of past messages and meeting transcripts to suggest replies.
• Y Combinator partner Gustaf Alströmer believes Scape could finally pry people away from Gmail.

For decades, email has been where work piles up. Now, two 23-year-old Swedes are asking: What if the inbox could start checking things off?

That's the vision behind Scape, a desktop email app that wants to do the work buried inside messages — and one that Y Combinator partner Gustaf Alströmer believes could finally pry people away from Gmail.

The Stockholm startup is opening a waitlist for early access on Thursday after raising $3.2 million from Y Combinator, General Catalyst, FundersClub, and other investors, Business Insider has learned. New users will be admitted in batches.

"It's painfully obvious that AI will transform email," Alströmer said in a statement. "Once people start using the product, they just don't go back to Gmail."

That is a bold promise in a category littered with beautifully designed casualties. Startups have spent years trying to outmaneuver Gmail with faster search, cleaner design, and clever keyboard shortcuts. Scape founder Melvin Hagberg argues they were all constrained by the technology of their time: There was only so much anyone could change about the basic job of an email client.

AI agents — systems that can take actions on a user's behalf — blew open what was possible, Hagberg said. Scape does not want to help people write emails faster. It wants to handle whatever the email asks them to do.

In a demo for Business Insider, Hagberg opened an email from a prospective customer asking whether to join Scape's waitlist or book a call. Scape drew on its memory of his past messages and surfaced four possible responses. When Hagberg chose the call option, the app drafted a reply with a proposed time based on his calendar.

Scape can also draw on transcripts from its built-in meeting recorder to remember what was discussed. In another example, the app found an order form, filled in the blanks for a particular customer, attached it to a response, and left the finished email for Hagberg to review.

Scape does not send the message itself. Hagberg said the app is designed to keep the user in control, particularly when an agent is making decisions based on years of private messaging.

Users can also instruct Scape through a chatbot built into the app. They can ask it to create a label to track emails for a project, draft variations of the same message for a group of recipients, or remember how they prefer to handle similar emails in the future.

Scape plans to make money through subscriptions, though the company has not disclosed pricing.

Hagberg arrived at the idea by creating a similar system for a much narrower group of workers.

After leaving his job as head of technology at an e-commerce startup, he began building software for customer support agents — the human kind. The tool helped them move beyond answering tickets and take actions across the other systems they used.

In 2025, Hagberg entered Y Combinator. There, he began to see that the same idea could solve many of his own frustrations with email. He pivoted the company to serve a much larger market.

Scape now has a second cofounder, Elis Hodzic, and three employees, all based in Stockholm. It has attracted backing from Swedish tech royalty, including Sebastian Knutsson, a cofounder of the game-maker behind Candy Crush, and Max Junestrand, whose startup Legora has become one of legal tech's fastest-growing companies. Other angel investors include employees from OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Ramp.

Scape is entering a crowded market. Superhuman has built a cult following around speed, while Google is adding Gemini features directly to Gmail.

Hagberg argues that those apps still help people manage email.

Scape's bet is that it can loosen Google's grip by doing the work inside the inbox.