Atypical financing

Kaboodle CEO and founder Manish Chandra took $3.5 million in funding from 10 strategic angel investors. It's a large sum for an angel round, hence the large number of angels. In our interview, I asked Chandra why he chose this route over the VC route, and whether he received a valuation in this round.  He did. Post-money valuation = $9.5 million. I also asked him why a Web 2.0 startup needed so much cash to operate a business. After all, don't Web 2.0 companies outsource all the content creation? Chandra has some interesting ideas he needs to build out. For instance, he's working on integrating product feeds from comparison-shopping engines and comparison-shopping travel sites. No partnerships to announce just yet. The goal? To get consumers to create pages of shopping or travel lists and to match these consumers up with the vendors.

Watch interview with Chandra

Comments

[Steve Mansfield]

Kaboodle likely has the same problem many of us have had in the past, and that is VC's are notorious for not investing in true A Round opportunities. The VC's we've dealt with want to see significant revenue generation before they jump in, regardless of what their executives might be saying in public. So the financing that Kaboodle has put together here seems to fit in with what we've been seeing in the marketplace. Also, Kaboodle is going to face many of the same issues that a lot of the start-ups you discuss in your article on Marketwatch today are going to face, and that is setting a structure that will provide their users with a platform on which they can find the content that others have shared on their sites with high relevance. So much of these start-ups' potential is going to be related to the evolution of social search. We better start really working on making tag-based searching a great way to find information.

[DL]

You're good, nice work, I like the people you've chosen and they are very much the heart of what's going on with regard to the internet. I just viewed 7 interviews in a row. You make good points but better you get people to tell the story. thx

FYI Your Slide is blocking my comments box. Could be Camino. Thought you'd want to know.

BTW consider "in closing", "as we conclude", "in the last few moments" to gesture your last question. ;>