According to Techcrunch, RedKix, which is launching its private beta today, has raised $17 million in seed funding from a group of high-profile investors to bring together the best aspects of Slack and other collaboration tools with the simplicity and ubiquity of email. The company's funders include Salesforce Ventures, Wicklow Capital, SG VC, Oren Zeev, Ori Sasson (one of the first investors in VMware), and others.

Many companies have promised to reinvent email over the years. So how is RedKix different? The service sits on top of your existing email accounts (it currently supports Microsoft Exchange, Office 365 and Google Apps accounts) and you can still use it to communicate with anybody else who has an email account, whether they are on RedKix or not.

When your contact is on RedKix, though, you'll get features like typing indicators, read receipts, and real-time messaging between users. Users who aren't on the service, though, will simply see receive regular emails as the conversation continues. With this, every email conversation essentially becomes an ad-hoc chat channel for RedKix users.

Besides the subject-based messages, RedKix will also feature a more traditional subjectless chat feature (think Slack channels), which will still be based around email, and group messaging, which will work similar to ad-hoc email lists.

RedKix is gearing its service toward enterprises and because of this, the team worked hard to ensure that the service plays well with existing email policies and other security and retention features enterprise admins may have set up for their users.

With this core platform in place (though still prone to the occasional hiccup, which is to be expected from an early beta), the team is now also looking at how it can best integrate third-party services, similar to what Slack is doing.

RedKix is now available in closed beta and accepting invite requests.