Memo

Overview

Memo was a messaging application founded in 2019 by Peter Saxton and Richard Shepherd in Exeter, UK. The company entered Y Combinator's Summer 2020 batch with a pitch to replace email and Slack with a calmer, richer form of asynchronous communication — one that let users comment on individual words, sentences, or paragraphs, and share links, videos, and galleries in a more structured format than a chat thread. It operated under the domain sendmemo.app and raised approximately $150,000 from YC as its sole institutional funding round.^[1][13]

Memo failed because it attempted to displace deeply entrenched communication incumbents with incremental UX improvements, while lacking the distribution strategy, network density, or runway to make those improvements matter. The product's core value — "feel-good communication" — was real as a user frustration but insufficient as a switching argument for teams already embedded in Slack or email workflows.

The company is listed as permanently closed on Crunchbase, and the sendmemo.app domain now resolves to a parking page.^[15][4] No acquisition, acqui-hire, or public shutdown announcement was made. Peter Saxton subsequently founded DID.app, a passwordless authentication product, and later pivoted further to building EYG, a new programming language — a trajectory that suggests a clean break from the communication space rather than a continued belief in the original thesis.^[10][11]

Founding Story

Peter Saxton and Richard Shepherd founded Memo in 2019 in Exeter, a mid-sized city in southwest England with a modest but growing tech community. The two founders brought complementary technical backgrounds: Saxton described himself as an experienced developer with expertise in API design, web application UI, and infrastructure reliability, with an academic background in Quantum Optics and, per Crunchbase, prior executive experience at Bango, a mobile commerce company.^[9][21] Shepherd described himself as a "UK based founder and full-stack web developer with sales experience running my creative agency in the south west of England."^[8]

How the two met is not documented in any public source. What is documented is the shared frustration that animated the product: the belief that existing communication tools — email in particular, but also Slack — had become hostile to focused, meaningful work. The YC listing frames this directly: "Forget laborious old email and hyperactive Slack. We built Memo as the feel-good alternative that will make you love communication again."^[6] Shepherd's portfolio site confirms the collaborative origin: "Peter and I developed Memo together during our time at YCombinator. Memo re-evaluated how online communication could work."^[18]

The founding insight was not technically novel — the "communication overload" problem had been articulated by dozens of prior startups — but Saxton and Shepherd believed the execution gap was real. Existing tools had been designed for speed and volume, not depth and clarity. Their answer was a messaging layer that borrowed from document annotation: the ability to comment on any word, sentence, or paragraph within a message, combined with rich media embedding and a visual design intended to feel calmer than a Slack channel.^[19]

The company applied to and was accepted into Y Combinator's S20 batch, which was announced as fully remote on April 20, 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.^[20] This was an unusual cohort environment: the peer network, in-person mentorship, and serendipitous introductions that typically define the YC experience were compressed into video calls. Whether this materially affected Memo's trajectory is speculative, but the remote format almost certainly reduced the density of investor relationships that founders typically build during the program.

One data anomaly worth noting: Tracxn tracks Memo under the alias "Plum Mail," associated with the legal entity MEMO LTD, and describes it as a provider of "email services."^[16] Whether "Plum Mail" represents an early product name, a pre-YC iteration, or simply a data error in Tracxn's system is unknown. No public record confirms a formal pivot or rebrand.