FullContact announced today it has raised $7 million in a Series C round and is releasing new mobile apps it thinks will help everyone tame their address books and contact lists.
The Denver-based company’s new app for iOS is available Thursday through the Apple App Store, and it plans to release apps for Android and Macs in the future.
Foundry Group was the lead investor for this round and is a prior investor in FullContact. 500 Startups and Blue Note Ventures, the new fund of Boulder-based VC Chris Marks, also participated in the round.
The new investment brings the total raised by FullContact to $16 million. In 2012, it raised a $7 million Series B round.
Since its founding in 2011, FullContact has tried to create applications that would combine the address books and contact lists people keep in apps like Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Its selling point was that it would consolidate and clean up messy address books and often out-of-date contact information without requiring users to spend the time to create a well-maintained, up-to-date, and accurate address book.
As anyone who has tried to tame just his or her own contact lists, that can be a tough proposition. FullContact wants to become the go-to contact management tool for everyone, and that’s a huge challenge.
“Contacts are a hard problem to crack, but after a few years of engineering investment, we think we’ve finally made a dent in the problem,” FullContact co-founder and CEO Bart Lorang said.
The new money will go toward developing new products and improving existing products, FullContact spokesman Brad McCarty said. The company also is hiring, looking to grow from 52 employees to about 70 by the end of the year, he said.
FullContact stores the information in the cloud, with users accessing it through a website. Late last year the company created its first product for Gmail, and it also has developed an application programming interface other companies can incorporate into their software. Between FullContact’s programs and those using the APIs, the company says it manages 2 billion contacts records a month.
But to fulfill its ambition of becoming “the contact management source of record for the world,” FullContact needed to be on mobile devices.
“We know that, in order to do that, we need to be on every possible platform,” McCarty said. “We started with iOS because that’s where the majority of our current users reside. We’ll be coming out with FullContact for Mac soon, as well as Android.”
The new app for iOS has been in the works for quite some time. Early in 2014, FullContact bought Cobook, a Latvian software company that made a popular contact management app for iOS.
Lorang said the new apps will combine the user-friendly features of Cobook with FullContact’s cloud-based capabilities. Among its features are the ability to erase duplicate contacts, back up contacts across multiple devices, and photograph business cards and upload the information.
Lorang has documented the travails of fundraising during FullContact’s early days. In this blog post, he said the company was turned down more than 126 times before finally getting investors to support the company. During that time, FullContact would go through the Techstars accelerator program.
