Acompli

History

Acompli was co-founded as a startup by Javier Soltero, the former chief technology officer of VMWare, alongside JJ Zhuang (CTO), and Kevin Henrikson (VP of Engineering). It received $7.3 million in funding from Redpoint Ventures, Harrison Metal and Felicis Ventures. At Redpoint Ventures, Satish Dharmaraj played a pivotal role in bringing the founders together.

In order to distinguish itself from other recent email startups, such as Mailbox, Soltero decided to target the enterprise market—particularly, users of Microsoft Exchange servers. He felt that such users had been underserved by the lacking or non-existent support for Exchange in existing mail apps, believing that their developers—despite its wide adoption, "do not fathom the possibility of anyone using Exchange." A result of this mandate was the decision to make the app a personal information manager rather than only an email client, integrating a calendar, a list of recent contacts, and a list of recent files from attachments and cloud storage services.

Acompli was first released on April 25, 2014, for iOS. An Android version was released in September 2014. On November 26, 2014, an incomplete post on its official blog prematurely revealed that Acompli had been acquired by Microsoft. The acquisition, valued at over $200 million (~$260 million in 2024), was officially announced on December 1, 2014. Rajesh Jha, vice president of Microsoft's Outlook division, stated that "We’re excited about what’s possible as we build on the app’s success and bring it together with work currently in progress by the Outlook team." Soltero assured users that the Acompli app would not be discontinued, and would continue to receive regular updates. On January 29, 2015, Acompli was re-branded as Outlook Mobile, uniting it with one of its original influences.