Santa Clara, April, 17, 2006 — Kaboodle, a free online service that simplifies collecting, organizing and sharing information on the web, announced today that it has raised $3.55 million in Series A funding from pioneers in search algorithms, online commerce and Web technologies. The funding will help accelerate Kaboodle’s growth, product development and marketing efforts.
The lead investors include Kanwal Rekhi, currently a managing director of Inventus Capital Partners who has led investments in more than 20 companies including Exodus Communications and NexTag; Ashish Gupta, the founder of Junglee, one of the first comparison shopping engines acquired by Amazon.com; early Google advisor Dr. Rajeev Motwani, Stanford University professor who co-authored the research paper behind Google’s PageRank algorithm; Ron Conway, an early investor in both Google and Ask Jeeves; and seasoned investors Shea Ventures, Garage Technology Ventures and Alpha Group.
“Kaboodle is improving on the search phenomenon,” said Kanwal Rekhi. “Search engines return thousands of results that are hard to sort through, share or collect. Kaboodle captures search results from across the web and lets consumers share and build on the efforts of others. Kaboodle is just what I needed, so I know that all consumers will benefit from it as well.”
In addition to veteran investors, the financing round includes notable industry leaders, including Ignacio “Iggy” Fanlo, the former president of Worldwide Field Operations at Shopping.com, an eBay company; Georges Harik, former director of new products at Google, such as Gmail and Google Talk; Jeff Clavier, the founder and managing partner of SoftTech VC; John Dougery of Inventus Capital; and Naren Bakshi, founder of Versata.
“We’re thrilled to have a talented group of investors who bring a rich cross-section of experience in online search and commerce that we can leverage as we grow Kaboodle,” said Manish Chandra, founder and CEO of Kaboodle. “Whether you are remodeling your home, planning a trip or researching your next school project, Kaboodle makes it easy for you to make the right choices.”
“Kaboodle’s information extraction technology is unique in its ability to automatically summarize the relevant information from any web page,” said Dr. Rajeev Motwani. “The simplicity of Kaboodle’s user experience will make it a part of everyone’s daily lives.”
Kaboodle combines its powerful technology with an active user community to simplify the process of collection, organizing and sharing information on the web. Unlike other information collection services, Kaboodle enables users to compare and recommend products and services and helps with not just discovery but also making the right choices.
“The decision to invest was easy because Kaboodle enables people to collaborate on one of the common uses of the Internet-shopping,” said Guy Kawasaki, managing director of Garage Technology Ventures. “When you add in the ability to collaborate on all types of online research, the decision became a no-brainer.”
About Kaboodle
Kaboodle is a free online service that simplifies collecting, organizing and sharing information on the web. By automatically extracting the relevant information from any web page, Kaboodle enables consumers to make better choices about online shopping, travel and research. Kaboodle organizes the collected information on a single customizable page for easy sharing, collaboration and posting of recommendations among users. Founded in 2005, Kaboodle is privately held and based in Santa Clara, California. Visitwww.kaboodle.com for more information.
