Gist raises $6.75M for a smarter email inbox

Gist, a startup that helps people cope with information overload by organizing their email and more, has raised $6.75 million in a first round of institutional funding.

The Seattle startup is still in private beta testing, and I haven’t had a chance to see the product in action. Still, the concept sounds very cool — it integrates with Microsoft Outlook and Gmail to aggregate emails and related material (links, attachments, news articles) by people and company. It also brings together feeds and information across social networks. Here’s an interview with founder and chief executive T.A. McCann, describing how people might use Gist:

The key scenario is–and we’ve all done it–is that prior to making a phone call or having a meeting with a person, you Google them. You may choose to find their LinkedIn profile, or their Facebook profile, or link to their company or other stuff. Essentially–you’re building an online profile or sales lead. In Gist, we do that automatically for all of your contacts. We assign, and discover information by connecting to your inbox.

It’s a bit like Xobni, the plugin that brings in social data such as Facebook profiles and feeds into Outlook. But Gist isn’t limited to Outlook, and it sounds like the company has a big vision for organizing information that goes beyond email. As someone who spends much of the working day trying to process hundreds of emails and feed items, I’m dying to give this a shot.

Gist previously raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Vulcan Capital. The new round was led by Foundry Group, with participation from Vulcan.