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August 8, 2007

Hearst Acquires Kaboodle for $30+ million

Michael Arrington

20 comments »

This is the second recent acquisition announcement for Hearst Interactive Media - UGO for around $100 million last month, and tonight they are announcing the acquisition of Kaboodle, a social shopping service that launched in late 2005.

Kaboodle, founded by Manish Chandra, Keiron McCammon, Chetan Pungaliya, closed a key distribution deal with eBay a year ago. Comscore numbers show rapid growth, with 2 million or so unique monthly visitors currently.

The acquisition price is not being disclosed, but we’re hearing it was somewhere between $30 - $40 million, all cash. The company raised three rounds of financing totaling $5 million from Shea Ventures, Kanwal Rekhi, Jeff Clavier, Ron Conway, Garage Ventures, Georges Harik, Rajeev Motwani, Iggy Fanlo and others.

One other thing we’ve heard - investor Ron Conway was “instrumental” in putting this deal together.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 8th, 2007 at 12:20 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. James

    August 8th, 2007 at 12:30 am

    What happen to Duncan?

  2. Designer

    August 8th, 2007 at 12:41 am

    This business model had a slight edge that made it successful.

    Shoppers could recommend and get noticed for their efforts

    Consumers and retailers could both benefit by visiting this site to learn what to buy and what to sell.

  3. Designer

    August 8th, 2007 at 12:43 am

    This business model had a slight edge that made it more likely to be successful

    - Shoppers could recommend and get noticed for their efforts

    - Consumers and retailers could both benefit by visiting this site to learn what to buy and what to sell.

  4. TechZilo

    August 8th, 2007 at 1:08 am

    When will the acquisitions end?

    Honestly, there are more acquisitions than startups now.

  5. John Kwag

    August 8th, 2007 at 1:20 am

    @ TechZilo

    It’s better than the IPO boom that doomed the first bubble. Less collateral damage.

    However, it is worrying that this might result in people creating companies to just flip into an acquisition instead of trying to create value added companies.

  6. AceLife

    August 8th, 2007 at 4:54 am

    Wow, seems like everyone is getting acquired. Michael tell them my web 2.0 doo hickey is up for sale too!

  7. patricia

    August 8th, 2007 at 5:15 am

    StyleDiary’s next! :)

    Manish did a great, great job at building that company. I was an advisor and am very happy to see the win for both him and Guy!

  8. Tanaka

    August 8th, 2007 at 6:57 am

    Congratulations for the buyers and the sellers!

    Tanaka
    CEO
    http://www.boo-box.com

  9. Michael

    August 8th, 2007 at 8:31 am

    Congratulations to Manish and the entire Kaboodle team. I have used the product since they got their start and liked the functionality so much we built it into PriceFight as the default wish list manager. It is a great product backed by a phenomenal team.

  10. Max

    August 8th, 2007 at 9:15 am

    Congratulations to the Kaboodle team! This is some great market validation for the social shopping space. As co-founder of Wishpot, a personal and social shopping utility, I firmly believe we have barely scratched the surface of the opportunity and innovation for social shopping.

  11. intelguy

    August 8th, 2007 at 9:51 am

    Never heard of them before, and it seems like interesting enough to be added to our shopping section over at intelways.com

    http://www.intelways.com
    The one-stop search site.

  12. Bill Worple

    August 8th, 2007 at 1:54 pm

    Congrats to Kaboodle. It will be interesting to watch how Hearst further develops Kaboodle. Hearst will have a ton of great content in their archives that will seamlessly enhance the products featured on Kaboodle, providing even more relevant content for the community.

  13. Kobe

    August 8th, 2007 at 2:59 pm

    Since we’re buying and selling, can someone acquire foreignart.com too?

    Kobe
    http://www.ForeignArt.com

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