Gist.

I am extremely excited to announce our Series A investment round led by Foundry Group with continued participation from Vulcan.  With this round, Brad Feld also joins the Gist board.  Here’s the official press release about it. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2009/05/prweb2390134.htm.

The hard work we did to conceptualize and launch Gist at Vulcan is really paying off as we continue to be amazed at the strong interest from users and smart investors.  There is definitely consensus from all sides that email is in desperate need of revolutionary innovation and that we can unlock some serious value by “connecting the inbox to the web”.

Vulcan and Foundry certainly represent “smart money”.  The team at Foundry has outlined key investment themes including – email and the implicit web which apply directly to Gist.  Add in the knowledge surrounding the semantic web from Paul Allen and Steve Hall at Vulcan Capital, my background in email, CTO Steve Newman’s search expertise, and a team of brilliant engineers and we have quite a bit of brainpower focused on the problem space.

We are going to use the funding to expand the team, build out our infrastructure, and continue to improve the product.  We are looking for the best software brains around and if you want to join us, send us your details.

We are focused on making Gist an essential tool for our users.  As on-line profiles and content proliferate and personal feeds become more mainstream, Gist will automate, aggregate and prioritize this flood of information for you. We want to save you time and bring you new insights, constantly looking for valuable and relevant information about your contacts and their companies.  We will continue to expand the platforms and data connections we support with the goal of putting Gist where you already spend your time – on the web, an email application, a CRM system, or a mobile device…wherever and whenever you need it.

For those of you waiting to try Gist, thank you for your continued patience as we scale up while incorporating all the great feedback from our earliest users.  We will be expanding our beta later in the year, so soon everyone will be able to try Gist.  Until then, take our survey and tell us a little bit about yourself or feel free to send us direct email with your ideas on being in the beta, info@gist.com.

At the end of the day, investors are looking for traction.  Certainly that means product evolution and features, but nothing means more than users!  Thanks to everyone who is in the beta program today for providing such valuable feedback and pushing us toward the future.  Onward.

T.A. and the rest of the Gist team