Shareaholic founder Jay Meattle was in touch today to say that his Cambridge startup has raised its first round of angel funding. Back in July, I reviewed Shareaholic’s popular browser plugin, which makes it easy to save or share material found on the Web via common social networking, social bookmarking, and news aggregator services.
Meattle wasn’t specific about the size of the round, saying it amounts to “a few hundred thousand” dollars. The list of funders, however, is a who’s who of Web 2.0 entrepreneurship and investing around Boston, including one serial entrepreneur, David Cancel, who worked with Meattle at both of his last two companies, Lookery and Compete.com.
The full list of Shareaholic’s angel investors includes:
—Ed Roberts, founder, MIT Entrepreneurship Center; co‐founder, Sohu.com
—Dharmesh Shah, founder and chief technology officer, HubSpot
—Eric Dobkin, Advisory Director, Goldman Sachs & Co.
—Brian Balfour, co‐founder, Viximo
—David Cancel, co‐founder, Compete
—Andrew Payne, investor in Care.com, Digium, HubSpot, and SmartFlix; co‐founder, FanSnap
—Brian Shin, founder and CEO, Visible Measures
Cancel, Payne, and Shin also serve on Shareaholic’s advisory board, along with Rob Go of Boston-based Spark Capital.
“I couldn’t think of a better group,” Meattle says. “They have deep knowledge and expertise in the space we’re playing in. We lean on them for advice all the time—they’ve all ‘been there and done that’ again and again.”
When I last talked with Meattle about Shareaholic, he said the company had spent a long time getting its browser plugin to the point where it’s comprehensive and easy to use, and that the coming months would be devoted to experimenting with different ways of monetizing the service. He confirmed that plan today. “We plan to spend the next few months determining what the best use of our data and user reach assets are,” Meattle says. “We have some pretty good hunches and have a lot of exciting stuff in the pipeline.”
Given the momentum the company has built up and the opportunities it has identified, “the time was right to raise some money to further accelerate and support our product roadmap,” Meattle adds.
