Foodzie Lands The Man Who Invented Google Gadgets As Its VP Engineering

Foodzie‘s artisan food marketplace just got some heavy duty engineering talent behind it. The company has hired Googler Adam Sah as its VP of Engineering. Sah is best known for helping invent Google Gadgets, which is used to power many widget-based services like iGoogle and Gmail Gadgets. He later served as a tech lead for Google research, and spent his time before Google at a number of startups.

Foodzie helps speciality food vendors get exposure by giving them a central online marketplace to sell their goods. Foodzie takes a cut of each sale, but the vendors are still left with more than they’d get if they sold their goods through traditional speciality food sites. It’s been a while since we last heard from the company, but CEO Rob LaFave says that things have been going very well. The site has grown from 25 vendors last December up to 250 this year. In the last 30 days it has seen around 85,000 unique visitors. And, perhaps most importantly, LaFave says that revenue for the site has grown by an order of magnitude in the last thirty days.

Much of that growth can be attributed to holiday shopping, but the site has also been working with media sites to help integrate co-branded marketplaces. For example, The Atlantic now features a co-branded Foodzie store to complement its ‘Food’ section.

Foozie debuted as part of the TechStars class of 2008, and last winter it raised a $1 million funding round led by Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC with First Round Capital and some other angel investors participating.