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.
More on the sFund:
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M.G. Siegler is a general partner at Google Ventures, where he primarily focuses on early-stage investments. He has been deeply involved in the startup space since 2005, first as a web developer, then as a writer, and most recently as an investor and advisor. Having spent the past year in London helping to get Google Ventures’ European organization up and running, M.G. is now back in the Bay Area, working mainly out of Google Ventures’ San Francisco office. Before joining Google Ventures, M.G. was a founding partner of CrunchFund, an early-stage investment fund. Prior to that, he reported on the startup world as a writer for both TechCrunch and VentureBeat. M.G. still writes a column for TechCrunch on top of writing on his own sites and from time-to-time doing movie reviews in haiku. Originally from Ohio, M.G. graduated from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor before moving out west to work in Hollywood. One day, he will write that killer screenplay.