Smarter-email startup Xobni has raised $7 million in a B round of financing from Cisco Systems and existing investors Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, Baseline Ventures, and Atomico. Three of the four existing investors increased their ownership stakes in the company. But Cisco led the round, highlighting the importance of enterprise e-mail for Xobni (that’s where the money is). CEO Jeff Bonforte says:
The people that use our product are professionals and corporate users (around 70% in North America), so we have always had a corporate focus (it is Outlook after all). We have been fielding a ton of demand to license our software for users in corporate environments…so we have been addressing that demand. Cisco’s participation recognizes that Xobni is being used heavily by corporate users (and professionals like lawyers, real estate agents, etc). Cisco knows those customers really well, so this is a big bonus for us to have them helping us.Obviously, building a business around these types of users and usage is a lot more straightforward than an advertising-based web 2.0 company.
Xobni previously raised a little more than $4 million. Its last round was in March, 2007. Its e-mail plug-in has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times. Xobni was in acquisition talks with Microsoft last year, but nothing came of it. Cisco’s interest in enterprise e-mail picked up last August with its $215 million purchase of PostPath, which it folded into its WebEx business. So there might be some product integration opportunities for Xobni as well. (Read our previous coverage on Xobni here).
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Well done Xobni.
Any idea what their revenues look like?
I don’t think they even have a revenue model in place.
Used it for a week. Pretty crappy. Slowed my outlook and eventually kept crashing. Even if they come up with a subscription model, I do not see any value in it. Mostly fluff.
Deadpool in 6 months - My 2009 prediction
Getting through 7m in 6 months sounds like a lot of fun though.
Nice. Glad to see that some companies are still getting those investment dollars and that everything isn’t completely dried up.
Peter Epstein
http://www.thewebwar.com
Interesting. They will have to bet on MSFT buying them.
I installed and used Xobni for a couple months. It is a fun toy, but doesn’t change the way I work in e-mail. I certainly wouldn’t pay for it.
I remember reading that they turned down a informal offer from MSFT?
Xobni is great. I use them daily and will certainly pay for it.
I dont know about that
Create or join a crunchie’s chat group at http://groups.im/
I’d have to agree with Jason. I used it for a while and while I found it interesting, and to some extent useful, I also noticed performance issues as it indexed. Frankly, although different, I find Gist a much more useful solution.
Very interesting that Cisco is directly involved in an Outlook-based solution.
–MS
Cisco has been snatching up host email and collaboration companies, Xobni is a great option as the web imbed options build out.
BTW- It didn’t change the way I do email, it caused evolution.
Happy to hear they raised and will continue evolving the product. I can’t stop thinking though that an investment by Cisco may limit their exit opportunities in the longer run to Cisco and a few other companies…
In any case, good luck with ‘Xobni for corporations’, ‘Xobni server deluxe’, etc
I love Xobni, have been using it for months, and just recently deployed it on every computer in our office. (All 11 of ‘em!
Just a note though, I only downloaded it once and put it on our file server for easy deployment. Just noticed where you said it’s been downloaded 1.5 million times, and wonder how many professional users weren’t counted as a download.
Everytime I download Xobni…more problems!! 3 different computers….all turn slow thks to Xobni…I hate it
Upgrade/ buy newer computers…
I had blogged about this before.
Xobni is very cool, but at the E 2.0 show in Boston I saw a MSFT demo of the Xobni killer in Alpha and I must say it was very cool and very fast. I hope that Xobni can create some cool partnerships and API’s and stays on top.
Cheers,
Vassil
I liked Xobni and have been using it since their private beta. It does slow down your computer a lot. I am sure they will address this issue in their future releases. Well.. Will I pay for it? Doubtful
The concept of Xobni is great but they must improve the quality of the add-on. Performance is a big pain and also too many bugs/crashes here and there. On the organization level users don’t have time/energy to handle bugs like this.
Good luck!
J
Does it slow your computer or slows Outlook?
11.4 million in funding for an outlook plugin with no clear revenue model? What happens when MS duplicates most of the functionality in the next version of Outlook?
MSFT will rip this off and the end of Xobni will be here. Why do they need $11 million to write a Outlook plug-in?
Exactly. MS even tried to do the right thing and buy them for $20M. But the VCs wouldn’t have gotten enough of a return, which sucks for the founders. That’s why you shouldn’t take $4M in VC money for an outlook plugin.
Lol… so true, Bob, so true!
I think that the valuation may be a little high, although not by much
statistics and email has not been mined it seems at all well yet
good luck to them !
regards
John Jones
http://www.johnjones.me.uk
a domain no one can pronounce. thats all we need. first impression people will think it as part of microsofts Xbox series.
i still would like to congradulate the founders for a job well done.
PostalLocator.com - send it
have to say I was also one of those who downloaded and ditched the application. So how many of the downloads ditched it after first try
So they basically (re-)invented GMAIL?
Same. Loved the concept, but slowed my daily activities to a crawl. Maybe its better now, but not enough value to try again..
….. I wish I could raise Millions of dollars in like.. 6 months..
Xobni has an especially unclear privacy policy and may harvest users email addresses. If you are interested in your privacy, I would not download this program.
You’re kidding? 7 mil for an Office add-on? Here’s my software….it’s called: “toN”….which is “Not” backwards.
Doesn’t the devil speaks English backward? They did in The Exorcist.
I’ve used it for about 6 months now. I had to go back to a previous version after the newest install corrupted my outlook files.
It tends to be memory intensive and the latest version even more so. I think they are off to a good start but no where near an area of performance I would consider paying for.
Hopefully, with the new funding they can streamline the program and make it more than just a glamorous form of threading.
Jeff bonforte? So what exactly is this guy’s background other than ostensibly leading funding rounds for failed gimmicky dotbombs?
Yet Another self promoting charasmatic charlatan that vcs can hide behind if they are revealed to have been utterly careless with LPs money.
What a pity when one’s desire exceeds one’s talent, eh? As Lenin said, useful idiots serve a purpose for the cynical manipulators. I would have expected more due diligence from vinod khosla.
@Voodoo: Jeff Bonforte was (let go/left on his own) from Yahoo in February 2007. Search around in the archives and you’ll find strong opinions about him floating around.
Great news, i’ve been using Xobni for over a year now and it’s a pleasure to use, really…could be improved a bit, so i hope this money will shine a new light on the updates?
Have all these VCs tried the product they invested in? If they did, I doubt they’d invested.
Great news for Xobni.
hopefully they’ll invest some of that in ensuring the app doesn’t chugg 100% cpu…
It is a great product, if you don’t mind waiting ages for outlook to unlock every time it does anything.
If they sorted that I would reinstall - I really like the look of the new linkedin hooks.
angus
To counter some of the previous posts, Xobni is more than just an Outlook plugin. Xobni is a platform, which currently only uses their own functionality to enhance Outlook, with the recent addition of some third party functionality (Yahoo! Mail, etc.). Their pitch is likely the expandability and potential of tightly integrating other enterprise applications with Outlook (like a CRM system). Given the size of the enterprise market, I can easily see investors getting excited over this (although CRM in Outlook might not be a real use case for anyone).
That said, I haven’t used Xobni. I use Google for your Domain for our startup, and at past companies when I’ve used Outlook, I’d be wary of downloading anything that poses any privacy or performance risks whatsoever. Unless the IT department deploys a site license (revenue model, by the way), I wouldn’t be using it in a corporate environment.
Additionally, it’s been mentioned that MSFT could clone the functionality and kill their market. Unless they have strategic partnerships in place before that happens, with major corporate players like SalesForce, they might be in trouble. I’m sure they’re planning their strategy accordingly, however.
i <3 xobni
Xobni aint bad! Outlook Track-It (google it!) is also a great plugin for Outlook in that it flags emails for a followup reminder.
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