CapLinked, a startup offering online workspaces for managing business deals, says that it has raised $1.6 million in Series A funding.
The funding comes from FF Angel (the seed-stage fund operated by Founders Fund), Siemer Ventures, 500 Startups, PayPal co-founder and Founders Fund managing partner Peter Thiel, former Bertelsmann executive Andrej Henkler, and Alexsis de Raadt-St. James, chairman of the Althea Foundation. (I asked which investor led the round, but co-founder and CEO Eric Jackson told me that the company isn’t sharing any more details.) CapLinked has now raised a total of $2.5 million.
The company has been compared to AngelList, but Jackson argues that the two services can be complementary, with startups finding investors on AngelList, then actually sharing documents and making the deal through CapLinked (he’s also released tools that make it easier to use CapLinked and AngelList together). CapLinked bills itself as a “platform that makes business transactions simple and secure,” and it says customers (which include financial institutions, M&A advisors, real estate funds, and, yes, startups) can use its virtual data rooms for deals in areas like fundraising, commercial real estate, and business development.
“For years now, companies have been forced to choose between cumbersome, expensive Virtual Data Rooms and decentralized, unsecure email to manage their complex transactions,” Jackson said in the funding press release. “CapLinked is changing this with our intuitive and easy-to-use platform.”
CapLinked is also announcing that it has hired Adam Sroka to lead its tech team as vice president of technology. Sroka’s past experience includes time at lean startup/development coaching companies Industrial Logic and BigVisible, and, according to CapLinked, he also developed an airtime tracking system for Homeland Security.
Back in February, CapLinked said that it had topped $20 billion in total deals hosted on the site.