Kaboodle gets lots of angel help

Updated

Here’s our Mercury News story (free registration) from the weekend about the increasing number of companies, including Kaboodle, Jeteye and Plum that let you save all the work you do while surfing on the Web — so that someone else can see it without duplicating your efforts. Likewise, these sites let you search the research other people have done, saving you the hassle.

We report that Kaboodle will announce today it has raised $3.55 million from 10 well-known individual investors. The round is unusually large for a group of angel investors, and may suggest a trend. Why not select a large group of individual investor operators, who have many more contacts between them than than a single venture investor who works for a large venture firm, especially when that investor serves on 12 boards, and focuses primarily on maximizing profits of his own investors?

(photo by Vaughn-Lahman)

Pictured here are co-founder Chetan Pungaliya (front), Manish Chandra (middle) and Brian Hansen, VP Product Management.

Kaboodle’s investors range from Georges Harik, former director of Google Labs and an early Google employee, to Kanwal Rekhi, a well-known investor in the Silicon Valley Indian community, and Rajeev Motwani, the Stanford professor who helped advise Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin during their early years.

Others include Guy Kawasaki (of Garage Technology), Ignacio “Iggy” Fanlo (of Shopping.com), Ashish Gupta, co-founder of Junglee, and two names we’re seeing with increased frequency in Web 2.0 angel rounds: Jeff Clavier, who runs SoftTech Venture Consulting in Palo Alto, and Ron Conway, early backer of Google and apparently a meister for putting angel rounds together (at least that’s what we’ve heard, even if he didn’t necessarily mastermind this one).

The story mentions several companies that play in this area, but didn’t mention several others, including folks like Aquaminds.