VC, IT, deals

Gist Gets $6.75M From Vulcan, Foundry Group

Ryan McBride 5/5/09

Gist, a Seattle startup developing an online service intended to help people organize information from disparate sources on the Web in a single location, has raised $6.75 million in a Series A round of financing, according to a statement. Foundry Group, a Boulder, CO-based venture firm, led the new round of financing, which included contributions from Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital, a founding investor in the company.

Gist, which was started in mid-2008 and is in closed beta, says its online service integrates Microsoft Outlook and Gmail to intelligently organize e-mails, news, and information from Twitter and other online sources in a single location such as an e-mail inbox.

The company is led by entrepreneur T.A. McCann, a former Microsoftie, who gave Greg the story on the company’s early days back in September. The basic idea was that people spend so much time managing new e-mails, searching for old e-mails, learning about new people, and trying to keep up with blogs of people we know, that it might be useful to put all the information in one place that’s easily searchable. The goal is so “we can get the gist of our communications rapidly,” McCann said at the time.

Ryan McBride is Xconomy's correspondent. You can reach him at rmcbride@xconomy.com, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/Ryan_McBride.