Seedcamp, the European-wide competition for early stage startups, has made one of its “standard” investments in Paris-based Kwaga. The investment is 50,000 Euros and between a 5-10% share in the company.
kwaga is designed to make email easier to manage by tagging it automatically with semantic information. This then extracts the meaningful part of the mail and via structured information. It sounds like a god-send – imagine being able to tell whcih email your should answer first?
The business model is to use that information and thus target with advertising, as wel as have Premium features and OEM partnerships.
There is a slight issue in that email in question has also to go through their servers, which may be a problem for some.
Their team consists of “superstar engineers and product developers” (it says here) which includes Philippe Laval – CEO (previously the founder and co-inventor of Sinequa, an enterprise semantic search engine software company that grew to $10M in annual revenues); Eric Bezy – VP (formerly of arvato services Logistics, Bertelsmann); Frederic Meunier – CTO (formely of Thales Communications, a super-duper French tech company); Gaelle Recource – CSO (a specialist of linguistic and semantic processes; and Jean Casamayou – CFO (former Financial Control Director at Artemis (Financiere Pinault).