VentureBeat

Blist, a simple database for non-experts, has raised $6.5 million in a first round of funding from Frazier Technology Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures.

The company started generating buzz last month after unveiling its product at DEMO (our coverage). The product’s big selling point is ease-of-use: it has the versatility and power of a relational database, but it doesn’t require knowledge of programming languages like SQL, and it can be used like a normal spreadsheet.

Gary Morgenthaler (left), a partner with Menlo Park, Calif.-based Morgenthaler Ventures, has plenty of experience with databases — in what he calls his “former life”, he founded database companies Ingres Corporation and Illustra Information Technologies before joining Morgenthaler full-time in 1996.

Since then, he says plenty of database companies have approached the firm for funds, but Morgenthaler has turned them all down. Those companies all wanted to squeeze into the existing database market, which is a big challenge. Blist, on the other hand, wants to expand the market to normal consumers, small business owners and others who find existing databases too difficult.

For example, Frazier partner Scott Darling (left) says his aunt — in her 80s — manually compiles and sends out a family mailing list several times a year. She’ll be able to create and manage the list much more easily on Blist, Darling says, so he’s hoping to get her hooked.

Darling — whose firm, like Blist, is based in Seattle — also notes that the existing database market is worth $15 billion. He estimates that Blist can snag “the bottom 20 percent,” namely people who are struggling with current products and would gladly embrace something more user-friendly.

And there will be plenty of opportunities to make money, Darling and Morgenthaler are quick to add. For one thing, Morgenthaler says the specialization of each database, called a “blist”, will make it easy to place highly targeted ads — it’s a no-brainer for wineries to advertise on a blist of different wines. Meanwhile, the fact that anyone can create or view a blist for free means that their usage can spread virally, and communities can grow around popular blists.

“(A blist) can become a meeting point, a gathering point for people with common interests,” Morgenthaler says.

Blist will also be charging for certain premium services, such as keeping your blist private.

With all the fancy software on the market, there’s a reason why many people are still trying to use the spreadsheet Microsoft Excel as a database, even though it’s not meant to be one, says Blist CEO Kevin Merritt. Even though the results can be clunky and involve a lot of square-peg-in-round-hole solutions, Merrit argues that for the layperson, everything else is just too hard.

That’s where Blist comes in. Through an easy-to-learn interface, non-technical types can build sophisticated databases containing information in a variety of formats, and they can search those databases without learning SQL or any other programming language.

Merritt gave me a quick demonstration of his product, showing off databases (called “blists”) that would have been tough to pull off in Excel. For example, he made one blist featuring the names of companies attending DEMO last week, logos, URLs, and tentative “star” ratings. Then he quickly searched for “five star” companies in a certain field.

I was also able to try out the Blist beta myself, and it’s as intuitive as the company claims. The default display format is a table, something that will be mighty reassuring to users who haven’t moved beyond Excel. Indeed, Blist can be used as a kind of “Excel-plus,” building what looks like a spreadsheet, but also giving you the ability to include text and numbers, and also documents, images and “pick lists”. For example, I built a database of stories recently published on VentureBeat, with authors chosen from a pick list, star ratings, URLs and company logos. (See screenshot below.)

You can also try viewing your database in other formats, like a calendar, and you can build databases within databases.

If you’re a database whiz, someone who closely follows VentureBeat’s coverage of products like LongJump and Dabble DB, and who has strong, well-thought-out opinions about which databases stand out in the crowded marketplace — well, you may not need Blist.

If on the other hand, you’ve been trying to shoehorn a menagerie of strange formats into Excel and think that “SQL” is just a random string of letters, then relief is at hand, Merritt says. He pitches Blist, now on-line in beta form, as a product falling between Excel and database management/software development program Microsoft Access — it has Excel’s ease and usability, but is “nearly” as powerful as Access, he says.

“Every database out there today is engineered for, or by happenstance is used predominantly by, engineers or (database administrators),” Merritt says.

The Seattle-based company generated considerable buzz at DEMO, but that doesn’t mean it will find a mass audience. Its user-friendliness is undeniable (as VentureBeat’s resident “not an expert”, if I can build a database in just a few minutes, anyone can). The question is whether people frustrated enough with Excel and other spreadsheets to try something new. Or will they stick with what’s familiar?

Merritt says Blist has around $800,000 of private funding betting on the new, and may go out for a first round of venture dollars soon.