Thursday, November 10, 2011

Shareaholic lands $1.9M from familiar Boston investors

By Kyle Alspach, Boston Business Journal

Shareaholic, a startup with a plug-in for making web content sharing easier, has raised a $1.9 million seed round from an ensemble cast of angel and venture capital investors. They include executives from 500 Startups, HubSpot and the Patriots.

The startup, based at the Dogpatch Labs accelerator in Cambridge, was founded in 2009 by Jay Meattle, a former product manager at Compete.

Meattle said the company has been funded to date by a $350,000 angel round from David Cancel (Performable/HubSpot), Brian Shin (Visible Measures), Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot), Ed Roberts (MIT Entrepreneurship Center) and Andy Payne (local serial investor).

The $1.9 million round, Meattle said, includes those investors and a handful more — including Jonathan Kraft (president of the New England Patriots) and institutional money from Dave McClure (500 Startups), Nicole Stata (Boston Seed Fund), and VC firms NextView Ventures and General Catalyst Partners, both of Cambridge.

In an e-mail, Meattle said the round was 2X oversubscribed.

“We weren’t even thinking about raising a round at the beginning of the summer, but our growth rate and traction started attracting a lot of inbound interest in the company,” Meattle said in an e-mail. “Given all the inbound interest, and the desire to accelerate we decided it was time to raise some additional capital to move faster.”

Meattle said Shareaholic has had 2 million browser plugin downloads to date and reached more than 250 million unique visitors.

Shareaholic plug-ins have been available for both web browsers and WordPress, and on Thursday the company also announced the release of a new widget for Tumblr. The startup was founded in 2008 after the Shareaholic plug-in won the top prize at a Mozilla Foundation contest for the best Firefox add-on.

Shareaholic employs seven, including two former employees of HubSpot-acquired OneForty, the startup said.