Station

Overview

Station was a Paris-based desktop productivity application that operated from 2017 to approximately 2021. Built inside eFounders, a B2B SaaS startup studio, and later accelerated through Y Combinator's Winter 2018 batch, Station aggregated a user's entire suite of SaaS web applications — Slack, Gmail, Notion, Airtable, and hundreds more — into a single unified interface with a sidebar dock, universal search, and consolidated notifications. At its peak, the product supported 600+ app integrations and reached 40,000 weekly active users spending an average of six hours per day inside it.^[1]

Station failed because it built a genuinely beloved free product and never found a way to charge for it. Its planned monetization model — selling promotional placement and deeper integrations to large SaaS vendors — required distribution leverage that 40,000 free users could not provide. Meanwhile, the core product category was structurally commoditized by open-source alternatives and gradually absorbed by browser and OS-level features.

The company quietly wound down commercial development around 2021 without a public post-mortem or acquisition announcement. The codebase was open-sourced, and the product now exists as a community-maintained project. Hexa, the parent company of eFounders, lists Station as "Inactive."^[2] Founder Julien Berthomier subsequently co-founded CraftNow and relocated to Singapore.^[3]

Founding Story

Station's origins trace not to a founder's personal frustration but to a deliberate product thesis developed inside eFounders, a Paris-based startup studio that has also incubated companies like Aircall, Front, and Spendesk. In 2016, Julien Berthomier and Alexandre Lachèze joined eFounders specifically to build what would become Station.^[4] The studio model gave them structured early support — office space, operational scaffolding, and a network of B2B SaaS operators — but it also meant the founding insight was partly institutional rather than purely founder-driven.

The thesis was straightforward: knowledge workers in 2016 were managing an average of a dozen or more SaaS tools simultaneously, switching between browser tabs constantly, losing notifications across apps, and struggling to search across fragmented data silos. The browser had become the de facto operating system for work, but it offered no intelligence layer on top of that chaos. Station's answer was to build that layer: a dedicated desktop application that would wrap every web app a team used into a single, organized, searchable environment.

Berthomier took the CEO role; Lachèze, who had studied engineering at Télécom ParisTech and previously worked as a Product Manager at Work4, became CTO.^[5] Daniel Putsche joined as a third co-founder, and Georges Abi-Heila led growth.^[6] The team was small — nine employees at the time of the YC listing — and remained Paris-based throughout its commercial life despite the Silicon Valley credibility that YC participation conferred.^[7]

The company formally incorporated in 2017 and launched publicly in October of that year with 300 app integrations already built.^[8] The speed of that integration build-out — 300 apps before a public launch — reflected the studio's ability to resource early development, but it also set a precedent: Station would prioritize breadth of integration over depth of monetization.

Quentin Nickmans, co-founder of eFounders, joined as an advisor in December 2017.^[9] Station entered Y Combinator's Winter 2018 batch the following month, giving the team access to the YC network and a Demo Day audience of investors. The YC application described users spending six hours per day in the product — a metric that would prove both Station's greatest asset and, ultimately, its most misleading signal.^[10]

Timeline

• 2016 — Julien Berthomier and Alexandre Lachèze join eFounders in Paris to begin building Station.^[4]
• 2017 — Station officially founded; incubated by eFounders.^[11]
• October 26, 2017 — Station publicly launches with 300 app integrations and 2,500 weekly active users; TechCrunch covers the launch, describing it as "the first smart workstation for busy people."^[8]
• December 2017 — Quentin Nickmans (eFounders co-founder) joins as advisor.^[9]
• January 2018 — Station joins Y Combinator Winter 2018 batch; team reports thousands of users spending an average of six hours per day in the product.^[7]
• March 2018 — Sam Hickmann joins Station's board.^[12]
• 2018 — Station raises a $3.25M seed round led by Accel, with participation from Kima Ventures and Webb Investment Network.^[13]
• October 8, 2018 — Station publishes its "Launch HN" post on Hacker News after completing YC W18; team announces focus on collaboration features and a third-party developer platform.^[14]