Stealthy Startup Dashlane Raises $5 Million In Series A

Stealthy consumer Internet startup Dashlane is announcing today that it has closed $5 million in Series A funding led by New York City-based firms Rho Ventures and FirstMark Capital. Also participating in the round is Dashlane co-founder Bernard Liautaud.

Dashlane won’t say much about its product offering just yet, only that it’s designed to eliminate the hassles involved with filling in personal information online, both on the desktop and on mobile.

How exactly Dashlane is different from current solutions is still unclear. There are several companies out there that help manage form-filling and automated password creation, for example. Web browsers have their own autofill capabilities, too. But Dashlane’s promise is that it will “do more” than what’s available now, and has features designed to work specifically with e-commerce and m-commerce sites. It will not actually store your credit card information on its own servers, CEO Emmanuel Schalit tells us.

We do know that it has filed four patents related to its IP, but product details, including what type of data is stores and how that’s stored, are sparse.

Dashlane was founded 18 months ago by Bernard Liautaud, the co-founder and former CEO of Business Objects, which was acquired by SAP for $6.8 billion in 2007. CEO Schalit came on around 9 months ago and will help manage the company’s New York offices.

Going forward, the company’s original engineering team will remain in its Paris-based offices, while its New York offices are staffed up. Over the next 12 months, Dashlane will double its roster of a dozen team members with new hires in areas that include support, community management, marketing, business development, and, as Schalit puts it, “engineers, engineers, engineers.”

New York was chosen as Dashlane’s U.S. home because of the time zone differences between it and Paris as well as the commute time between the two cities. But Schalit says that the company also believes New York City is a place that’s “starting to catch up with Silicon Valley,” and is becoming an attractive place to set up an Internet business. He notes, too, that there isn’t as much competition for talent as there is out West.

In addition to hiring, the new funds will be used to advance product development, and in particular, mobile development – a key piece to Dashlane’s overall solution.

The desktop service will launch in a few weeks time, with the mobile component to follow. The site’s homepage is hosting a sign-up form for interested users now.

As part of today’s announcement, Habib Kairouz, managing partner at Rho Ventures, and Rick Heitzmann, managing director of FirstMark Capital, will join Bernard Liautaud and Dashlane CEO Emmanuel Schalit on the board, bringing the total board to four members.