Memory enhancement service Evernote is loved by many, including, it appears, venture capitalists. This morning, the startup is announcing that it has raised its third institutional round of funding, and it’s a whopper:
Sequoia Capital and previous backers are injecting $20 million into the company – that’s on top of the $25.5 million the company raised earlier.
Roelof Botha, Partner at Sequoia, will join the Evernote board as an observer.
Evernote, which is billed as a service that “helps the world remember everything”, says it has attracted close to 5 million users worldwide in less than two and a half years (up from 4 million mid-August 2010).
These users are given the choice of thirteen different desktop, mobile and browser options for capturing things to remember (think meeting notes, wine labels, shopping lists and whatnot).
In a statement, Evernote CEO Phil Libin says users can expect “more of everything” now that the funding round is all done and signed, and that the company will explore new markets and opportunities in addition.
In a blog post, Libin speaks more candidly about the company’s ambitious growth plans, although he declines to go into too many details about Evernote’s roadmap for the future:
We’ll build more features, fix more bugs, add more devices, expand into more countries, and make Evernote indispensable to more types of users (including corporate and educational folk). We’ll take this $20 million, combine it with the more than $9 million that we still have from last year’s “B” round, and put it all back into the product.
According to the chief executive, Evernote has signed up more than 10,000 new users every day in the past two months, released major new updates to most of our clients, added more than a dozen new partners and increased revenue from Premium subscriptions to the point where it can fund all of the startup’s day-to-day operations.
Libin also blogs that Evernote, in time, will grow from a solution that helps you remember everything to the “global platform for human memory” and to become “the trusted, permanent and ubiquitous destination for all of your lifetime memories” – a lofty goal if I’ve ever heard one. Good thing we’re big fans of lofty goals around here.
The full list of investors for Evernote’s $20 million Series C round: Sequoia Capital, Morgenthaler Ventures, Troika Dialog and DOCOMO Capital.
Evernote allows users to capture, organize, and find information across multiple platforms. Users can take notes, clip webpages, snap photos using their mobile phones, create to-dos, and record audio. All data is synchronized with the Evernote web service and made available to clients on Windows, Mac, Web, and mobile devices. Additionally, the Evernote web service performs image recognition on all incoming notes, making printed or handwritten text found within images searchable.
Sequoia Capital is a venture capital firm founded by Don Valentine in 1972. The Wall Street Journal has called Sequoia Capital “one of the highest-caliber venture firms” and noted that it is “one of Silicon Valley’s most influential venture-capital firms”. It invests between $100,000 and $1 million in seed stage, between $1 million and $10 million in early stage, and between $10 million and $100 million in growth stage. The firm has offices in the U.S., China, India and...
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