Anish Acharya and Jeson Patel became friends in college, at the University of Waterloo.
After graduating, they worked at Amazon and Microsoft, respectively, but eventually decided to ditch their comfortable jobs to try to make something on their own, landing on the idea for a games platform for smartphones.
Google ended up acquiring their company, SocialDeck, for $10-25 million in 2010.
Both men soon found their niche at Google — Acharya with Google+ and then Google Ventures, and Patel with Google Play Games — but, four years later, the itch was back.
When Acharya became entrepreneur in residence at Google Ventures, his old partner rejoined him to try to make something new. And so Snowball was born.
The idea is that Snowball brings together all of your conversations into one place. By pulling in the information from all the messaging apps on your phone, Snowball makes sure you'll never lose track of a convo.
"We're not trying to replace any of these messaging apps, we're trying to give you faster access to them," Acharya told Business Insider. "In our early beta, we're actually seeing that engagement with each one increases by about 20%. We're complimentary."
When you download Snowball, it automatically pulls in messages from all your apps, without you having to enter login information for each one. When you get a message, the Snowball icon will pop up like the Facebook "chat heads" notifications do.
At launch, Snowball integrates with Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Snapchat messages, Google Hangouts, Twitter DMs, WeChat, Line, Slack, and regular text messages.
The company has raised $2.3 million from First Round Capital, Google Ventures, and more.
Here's a demo of how it works:
SEE ALSO: Check Out Pinterest's Gorgeous, Artsy Offices, That Will Make You Want To Craft Something