Sistava

Shortwave

AI-native email client for Gmail with search, summarisation and an assistant

About Shortwave

Shortwave is an AI-native email client for Gmail, built by former Firebase engineers, with strong AI search across your full mail history, thread summarisation, scheduling and an assistant that drafts and organises. It is small and focused, roughly 17 people on $9M raised. Sistava is a workforce platform where email is a channel an employee uses, not the product itself.

Platform details

Official website

What Shortwave does differently

Search. Most email AI drafts replies; Shortwave treats your mail archive as a searchable knowledge base and lets you ask questions of it in natural language. For anyone whose institutional memory lives in ten years of Gmail, that is the killer feature. Around that sits the expected set: thread summarisation, AI drafting, scheduling help, smart organisation. The client itself is fast and cleanly designed, built by people who came from Firebase and clearly care about latency. It is a small, focused company, roughly 17 people on $9M raised and about $1.9M revenue in 2025. That is worth knowing both ways: sharp and responsive, but not an enterprise vendor.

Shortwave versus Superhuman

They compete directly and split on emphasis. Superhuman optimises for speed of processing, with keyboard-first interaction and a premium feel, now priced at $33 to $40 per seat on the Business plan. Shortwave optimises for intelligence over your archive, with much stronger AI search, and keeps a free entry point that Superhuman removed. If you process high volume and want to move through it fast, Superhuman. If you dig through history and want to ask questions of it, Shortwave. Both leave the actual work of replying, following up and updating systems with you.

When an email client is not the answer

Email tools optimise the interface to your workload. That is genuinely useful and has a ceiling: however good the client, a human still reads, decides and types. The situations where that ceiling bites are the ones where volume is not the issue but capacity is. Nobody chased the twelve leads that went quiet. Nobody answered the support backlog. Nobody wrote the follow-up you promised on Tuesday. A workforce puts an employee on each of those, using email as one of its channels. That is a different purchase from a better mail client, and plenty of people should buy both.

Comparison