Xobni, a social Microsoft Outlook plugin, has just raised $16.2 million in funding from Khosla Ventures and RRE Ventures, with Baseline Ventures, Atomico Ventures, First Round Capital, BlackBerry Partners Fund and Cisco participating in the round. We confirmed this with the company. This brings Xobni’s total funding to over $30 million.
Xobni’s social email plugins essentially makes your e-mail smarter (Xobni is inbox spelled backwards). The plugin integrates LinkedIn, Twitter Yahoo Mail, Facebook, Skype, Hoovers and more into your Outlook inbox. CEO Jeff Bonforte tells us the plugin has seen 5 million downloads to date.
The round was an insider round and Bonforte seemed pleased that inside investors were fighting over who would lead the round. He says he’s happy with the valuation but declined to give us a number. The funding will be used for further product development, more mobile apps, and expansion of the plugin into other email platforms besides Outlook.
Xobni, which took an investment from the Blackberry Partners Fund last year, recently launched a Blackberry app that ranks your contacts by importance and pulls in social data from Facebook, LinkedIn and other places.
Along with the Blackberry app, Xobni also launched another product, Xobni One, that syncs your Xobni contacts in Outlook with your contacts on your Blackberry, all in the cloud. Xobni One is a way to sync your desktop and mobile contacts. If you use Outlook on your desktop at work, but Gmail on your Blackberry, Xobni One reconciles the two. Xobni is charging users for this service, which is just one of many revenue streams for the company.