14 DAY TRIAL // Rapportive, the startup behind the Gmail plugin with the same name, has now announced that it has raised $1 million from a group of high-profile angel investors including Gmail creator and FriendFeed founder Paul Buchheit and serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis. The add-on has been very well received and the funding now ensures that it can survive and come up with a business model. The plan, for now, is to develop a freemium mode, with a basic free version and additional features and info available for a price.
Rapportive is a browser add-on available for most popular browsers out there including Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Apple Safari. When installed it replaces the right sidebar ads in Gmail with its own data providing info on the email’s sender. It taps into several sources to fill in that data.
For people it uses LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Profiles, blogging services and so on to provide you with additional resources and contact methods. It also provides a small bio, depending on what’s available online. Finally, it also lists the person’s last few tweets for even more context. For companies and websites, it pulls data from the site themselves to provide you with a short description as well as links to popular sections, depending on how the site is set up.
It launched in early spring and managed to get a lot of attention and some dedicated users. If you’re an avid email user and have too many contacts to keep up with, Rapportive is the tool for you. It’s not the only company providing this type of service, but it’s simplicity and ease of use has been appreciated.
This is the first founding round the company undertook and the interest has been impressive. Angel investors Paul Buchheit, Scott Banister, Jason Calacanis, Gary Vaynerchuk, David Cancel, Dharmesh Shah, Shervin Pishevar and Roy Rodenstein participated in this round as well as venture capital funds 500Startups, VentureHacks, Charles River Ventures, Kima Ventures, Zelkova Ventures and BOLDstart Ventures, according to TechCrunch.