CrunchFund founder Michael Arrington has just blogged about his investment in just.me. This follows an earlier TechCrunch post disclosing our A Round financing that was followed up on Vator.tv and VentureBeat.
So I can confirm that the company has indeed partnered with Khosla Ventures in bringing the just.me software to market. They join True Ventures who re-invested and our other seed investors. The total new money was just over $2m, adding to the $550k seed we raised earlier in 2011.
Now isn’t the time to talk about what just.me is, we can do that as it evolves once it is available later in the year. But one thing we can say is that it isn’t trying to kill or replace any other service.
just.me is a new architecture built on top of the mobile, and particularly the smartphone, ecosystem. It doesn’t take the web as its starting point, it takes the highly personal and ever-present mobile Internet as its starting point. As such it is focused on defining a new consumer software experience, not replacing an existing one. It is also focused on the freedom that comes from placing social tools on a device the consumer fully controls, and not building a big cloud service that owns or acts on the consumers data. We don’t know all of the questions this gives rise to yet, never mind all of the answers. But we are really excited about building on this new ecosystem and learning with users as we go.
I can also say at this time that we have recruited a great team. More on this in a later post.
We are pleased to tell you that just.me has been named as a finalist at this years SXSW interactive festival in Austin. The Startup Accelerator competition takes place on the 12th and 13th March at the Austin Hilton Downtown, Forth Floor – Salons A, B & D. The Schedule is here.