Xobni is a San Francisco-based email startup. It was founded in March 2006 by Adam Smith and Matt Brezina from Adam’s dorm room in Cambridge, Massachusetts as part of the Y Combinator summer founder’s program. In late 2006, it relocated to San Francisco when the founders felt that the environment there was more suited to grow their company.
In March 2007, Xobni raised US$4.26 million from Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, and Atomico, along with a number of angel investors.
Xobni’s first product, Xobni Insight, was launched into private beta on September 18, 2007, at the TechCrunch 40 conference. Xobni Insight plugs into Microsoft Outlook and offers fast search and people-based navigation of email archives. The company has hinted at plans to offer the same functionality for other email clients. Xobni Insight has received mostly positive coverage, although initial versions had performance problems on large inboxes. The company opened its beta to the public on May 5, 2008 and has since garnered media coverage from a number of blogs and media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe and Cnet.
In February 2008, Xobni hired Jeff Bonforte, a Vice President at Yahoo!, as their CEO. In the same month, Bill Gates gave a demo of Xobni at the Office Developers’ Conference. This led to rumors of a US$20 million acquisition by Microsoft, which the company reportedly rejected.
Cisco Systems, which has been expanding its workplace collaboration tools, has taken an interest in Xobni. Xobni announced on January 5, 2009 that it closed a $7 million round of financing, its second, with Cisco as a new investor. The company’s previous investors Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, Baseline Ventures and Atomico also participated. The website CrunchBase has total funding at $14.6 million for the San Francisco based software development company.
There have been a lot of questions since the product release of how Xobni planned to make money and the scope of their products. In July of 2009 Xobni released a paid version of its product called Xobni Plus, offered initially for $30. Xobni Plus includes features such as advanced search, appointment search, the ability to search multiple PST archives, no ads, and one year support. In Free Studio version 4.2 Xobni is included in the .exe setup.
“Xobni” is the word “inbox” spelled backwards. It is pronounced Zob-nee.
Size : 6.3 MB
