Stealth Social Startup Cafebots Scores The First Money From Kleiner Perkins’ New sFund

Thursday, 21 October 2010 20:10

Stealth Social Startup Cafebots Scores The First Money From Kleiner Perkins’ New sFund

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You’ve likely heard of CRM, customer relationship management. But have you heard of FRM — friend relationship management? Probably not. But Cafebots hopes to change that shortly.

We don’t know much about the still-in-stealth startup which was co-founded by three folks out of Stanford, but we do know that the company has just secured $5 million in funding. And the

funding is perhaps even more significant because they are the first company funded as a part of Kleiner Perkins’ new sFund, the social fund announced today at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, CA.

“We live in a world where social is the new search,” Cafebots co-founder Yoav Shoham told us when we had the chance to speak to him earlier. “The manual curation of the web was important, but now we’re emerging into this social layer,” he continued. He noted that while there have been some attempts, no one has nailed this FRM idea yet. “People are touching parts of the elephant, but no one has gotten it,” is the way Shoham put it.

He wouldn’t give us anything beyond that aside from saying that their products will play nicely will all the social platforms out there. They won’t be just tied to Facebook, for example.

The company currently has six employees, but they hope to double that by the end of the year. It’s around that time that they hope to have their first product ready, we’re told.

Alongside the sFund investment, Kleiner partner Bing Gordon will be joining Cafebots’ Board. “We love working with Kleiner, and we love working with Bing. The sFund is a bullseye for us,” Shoham said.