Ocean’s new app brings inbox triage, tasks and invites to Gmail users

Summary

A new personal productivity app called Ocean is launching to help you triage your overloaded inbox, take action on your emails by turning them into tasks, and share your availability for meetings with others, all in one app. Today, Gmail so heavily dominates the email market that few challengers emerge. Understanding this, Ocean made the decision to work with Gmail, not compete against it. As a third-party client, gaining a footing in the market can be difficult, but successful email apps have proven lucrative acquisitions. Yahoo bought email app Xobni for $60 million and Microsoft snapped up Accompli for $200 million in the previous decade, for instance. This market opportunity attracted co-founders Martin Dufort and Scott Lake — an early Shopify co-founder — who created BigWaveLabs in early 2019 and began to tackle email. This work ultimately resulted in Ocean, an app focused on more efficient email management. The app works with Gmail or Google Workspace accounts, allowing users to turn their emails into tasks and action items so they’re not forgotten. To make this work, the app includes its own Task Manager that has access to the user’s email. That means you don’t have to copy or paste information into an external to-do app while instead gaining access to features that go beyond what Google’s task manager offers Gmail users. With Ocean, you can create tasks using rich formatting, set due dates, organize tasks into folders, and link emails to your task’s notes. It can also automatically pull out action items from longer emails for you. You can choose to manage the emails you mean to reply to later by creating a task as well, instead of leaving them unread or applying a label of some sort. Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 27-29, 2025 Image Credits:BigWave Labs Inc. For inbox zero enthusiasts, the killer feature will be Ocean’s inbox triage tools. The app lets you filter emails by categories like first-timers (people who emailed you for the first time), per...