The story
Hiver began as GrexIt in 2011, founded by Nitesh Nandy and Niraj Ranjan Rout. The product was initially developed in 2010 while the founders participated in The Morpheus startup accelerator. The startup later joined the Citrix Startup Accelerator and received undisclosed investment from Citrix and Vijay Shekhar Sharma.
A beta version of GrexIt was released in 2011, with functionality aimed at enabling workplace collaboration within email inboxes. The product was publicly launched in 2012. Early versions of GrexIt centered on two functions: shared email labels that synchronized messages across team inboxes to support assignment and status tracking, and a cloud-based shared email repository that provided organization-wide access to relevant threads for collaborative input.
In 2015, GrexIt renamed its product to Hiver with increased functionalities from email-boxes. It incorporated email project management among other services.
In October 2018, the company raised US$4 million in funding from Kalaari Capital and Kae Capital. During this period, the product shifted from a general email-based collaboration tool to a shared inbox system delivered through a web browser extension that runs inside Gmail. The update introduced additional tools, including email assignment, internal comments with @mentions, collision detection, message templates, scheduling, shared drafts, and basic rule-based automation for email categorization and routing.
In February 2021, Hiver raised $4 million in debt financing Mars Growth Capital. In March 2022, the company announced a US$22 million Series B round led by K1 Capital, with participation from existing investors Kalaari Capital, Kae Capital, and AngelList.
As of 2024, Hiver functions as an AI-enabled help desk built for teams using Google Workspace, providing shared inbox management, workflow automation, analytics, a knowledge base, and support for channels including email, live chat, voice calls, and WhatsApp, with AI used for drafting replies and routine tasks.
From Wikipedia’s article on Hiver (company), shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4