May 5 2009

Foundry Group Invests in Gist

Today Foundry Group announced that we’ve invested in Gist and I couldn’t be more excited about what they are working on (see our blog post here; Gist’s post here).

Gist has developed a powerful product that helps users find and sort information about the people, places and companies that are meaningful to them ("where your inbox meets the web") . It’s an implicit service – they use information contained in your inbox, calendar and contacts to determine the strength of various connections and surface both public and private information about topics that are both timely and relevant for you. For example for an upcoming meeting Gist will organize not only news stories and social media mentions of the company and/or people you’re meeting with, but also organizes all of your correspondence with people from that organization (separating out email, attachments, etc.). I use it every day to help me sift through the mass of data and information that’s important to me (see my post on that subject from a few weeks ago here).  For Foundry, the problem Gist is attempting to solve is right at the intersection of Email and Implicit Web – two themes that we’ve been involved with for many years.

We’re extremely excited to be working with TA, Steve and the entire team at Gist