The best part of waking up is Sunrise in your inbox

I wake up every morning to a cup of coffee and my calendar. With a constant parade of interviews and calls, deadlines, conferences, events, and meetings, my schedule is jam-packed. Today two ex-Foursquare designers are launching a brand new company to simplify the scheduling part of people’s lives.

The product is called Sunrise. It is a “smart” and “beautiful” email digest of your day. Founders Jeremy Le Van and Pierre Valade were high up designers at Foursquare. Disappointed by the available calendar options, they decided to create an alternative that puts user experience at the forefront. 

The platform connects APIs from anywhere people might have a calendar, including Facebook, Google Calendar, LinkedIn, and Eventbrite. It merges all of the information in an attractive email that arrives in your inbox every morning. It is optimized for mobile, since around 50% of users open the digest from their smartphones, and it includes integration with LinkedIn that pulls in profiles of people you’re scheduled to meet.

Sunrise also offers relevant information about the weather, birthdays, and addresses, so everything you need to go about your day is consolidated in one place.

“Calendars is one space that hasn’t really evolved in the past years, and it’s time to connect all the information together in a smart way,” said Valade. “When users wake up, it’s already their routine to check their emails, so we are in the natural flow they’re used to. It is both simple and powerful. We designed at least 25 different variations before finding the right one that will work both on mobile and desktop. I think we’ve designed the best email ever.”

Valade and Le Van left Foursquare earlier this year for this project and are still in the early stages. The team is just two people, and they have not yet set out to fundraise. Of their early adopters, 50% open their Sunrise every day, which Valade said is high compared to traditional emails. This design-focused duo is committed to constant iteration, to make Sunrise as user-friendly as possible, and to “solve calendars.”

Sunrise is based in New York.