How much time do you waste trying to find pictures or documents that were sent to you as email attachments? If creating a product around a consumer “pain point” is what startups are supposed to do, then attachments.me is tackling a pain point almost everyone has. Foundry Group certainly thinks so. Today it announced that it invested in the startup. What it didn’t announce was the size of the investment. I’ve confirmed with founder Jesse Miller that it was a $500,000 seed round, and that Foundry took the whole thing.
Attachments.me was founded by Miller, Ben Coe and SimpleGeo co-founder Joe Stump (who acts as an advisor). The service indexes all the attachments to your email and presents them in a visual grid. This is especially helpful when you are trying to find PDFs, pictures or videos (it also indexes Flickr photos and YouTube videos linked to in emails). It extracts structured data from the attachments, which helps to pinpoint its search results.
The service reminds me of Xoopit, which was the only Gmail plugin I ever used before Yahoo bought it and killed the Gmail support. Being able to search visually through documents and photos in email just speeds everything up.
Attachments.me doesn’t yet have a Gmail plugin (it works through its own external site), but Miller says that is on the roadmap, along with a Chrome extension, an iPhone app, and a general API. He also wants to add support for more types of email and other accounts such as Yahoo, IMAP, and Facebook. The seed capital will be used to hire more engineers and further develop the product.