San Fran­cis­co-based start­up Out­box, which con­verts snail­mail into dig­i­tal for­mats and places it online, has raised a fur­ther $5 mil­lion in Series A fund­ing (it raised $2.2 mil­lion just two years ago). Although it’s not the first firm to con­vert phys­i­cal mail to dig­i­tal (there’s Zum­box, for exam­ple), it is cap­i­tal­iz­ing on the mas­sive trend toward online com­mu­ni­ca­tion. And there’s lit­tle doubt that most sea­soned tech prod­uct man­agers will agree that there’s gold to be mined in that transition.

Proven pop­u­lar­i­ty 

The lat­est fund­ing round was led by its exist­ing investor, Flood­gate, with par­tic­i­pa­tion from Expan­sion VC, Cor­re­la­tion Ven­tures, Founders Fund, Peter­son Ven­tures, TDF Ven­tures and WTI, although 80 small­er investors also con­tributed through AngelList.

Dur­ing ear­ly test­ing, just three per­cent of its test users can­celed before it went live. Now that it has, its wait­ing list has run into the thou­sands and it’s expect­ed to come out of closed beta lat­er this year.

For the intrigued prod­uct man­ag­er, the ser­vices run as fol­lows. Designed chiefly for urban mar­kets, the com­pa­ny col­lects mail from sub­scribers’ phys­i­cal mail­box­es three times a week. Small pack­ages will be trans­ferred to an Out­box-brand­ed mail­er and placed in the hands of front desk staff or the build­ing concierge (they can also be deliv­ered to alter­na­tive des­ti­na­tions if request­ed, like the user’s work­place). Paper mail is scanned and con­vert­ed to dig­i­tal, where­upon it can be accessed via web, iPad, iPhone or Android in a kind of Drop­box for mail.

Expan­sion plans

Prod­uct man­agers who may be feel­ing a lit­tle uneasy about the prospec­tive suc­cess of a ven­ture that involves third par­ties (or “un-post­men”, as Out­box calls its oper­a­tives) rifling through pri­vate mail may be mis­tak­en. Out­box says its ser­vice is actu­al­ly more secure than ordi­nary phys­i­cal mail. Once doc­u­ments have been scanned and put online, the hard copies are safe­ly shred­ded, not just tossed in the garbage as so many of us are inclined to do with phys­i­cal mail.

And any remain­ing prod­uct man­ag­er skep­ti­cism will be dis­pelled by Outbox’s poten­tial ver­sa­til­i­ty: co-founder Will Davis says that it can be adapt­ed for addi­tion­al appli­ca­tions, like check deposits or bill payments.

The new invest­ment is like­ly to be ploughed into ser­vice expan­sion, with New York, Boston, Chica­go, Wash­ing­ton, D.C. and L.A. on the company’s list of priorities.