VentureBeat

There already plenty of ways to share and edit documents online, but a startup called DocVerse may be preparing a better solution. The stealthy San Francisco company recently raised $1.3 million from Baseline Ventures, Michael Dearing and undisclosed angel investors.

John Cook of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer first reported the funding, which VentureWire also confirmed. Co-founder Shan Sinha told Cook that DocVerse “will help people collaborate with others on documents more easily and effectively than anything available today.” That’s big talk, and since the company’s tool is still in private testing mode, I can’t say whether it holds any water. But Sinha and his co-founder Alex DeNeui have credibility and experience, since they’re both former managers with Sharepoint, Microsoft’s collaborative tool. The DocVerse Web site also lists Microsoft as one of the company’s advisors.

Now, the free offering Google Docs makes life much easier for the VentureBeat team to work with and edit each other remotely. But Docs definitely has its roots with the consumer audience, not the entepterprise customer base that it’s starting to targeting, and I still run into occasional bugs. Plus, DocVerse says it will offer some cool new features, including the ability to send and receive faxes, and also to collaborate using existing tools like Microsoft Outlook and Word, rather than forcing you to adapt to a new application.