Our Investment in Memeo

Since the launch of the Foundry Group blog, we’ve written at length about our thematic investing style, some of the specific themes we are looking at (HCI, Glue and Implicit Web), our backgrounds and our view of how geography factors into our investment criteria. We have yet to write about any of the companies we’ve actually invested in thus far – something we plan to do regularly in this space.

Not all of our portfolio companies are ready for us to start making noise about them, which is hard for us since we are passionate about the entrepreneurs and companies we back. But for those companies that are publically launched and have announced our investment, it is high time we start talking about them. Over the next several weeks you can expect to see posts from us on each of the investments we’ve made so far (at least the ones we can talk about) – a trend we’ll continue as we add new companies to the portfolio.

Today’s post introduces Memeo, one of the handful of investments we made shortly after we closed our fund in November last year. I wrote in detail about our motivations behind investing in Memeo on my personal blog in January, so I’ll just provide a short summary here.

Since we’ve been busy talking about investment themes, it is worth mentioning that Memeo fits into a theme we call Digital Life (a theme that we haven’t blogged about yet, but one which we’ll talk more about in a future post) For the purpose of understanding our Memeo investment it’s enough to simply understand that the Digital Life theme encompasses technologies and products that include digital media, consumer electronics, so-called digital home applications and the software and services that help consumers deal with the ever-growing number of devices and technologies they must manage on a day-to-day basis. An example of a previous investment we made in the Digital Life theme is place-shifting pioneer Sling Media, makers of the Slingbox, who were acquired by EchoStar last year for $380m.

Memeo has built an intelligent media-management technology platform that is aware that different media types (photos, videos, audio, etc) need to be handled differently, that the number of devices (laptops, phones, cameras, networked media-players, etc) and destinations (web-drives, NAS storage, USB thumb drives, etc) are only going to increase over time, and that users will need increasingly sophisticated (yet easy to use) tools that will help them protect, manage, synchronize and share their media. The elegance of Memeo’s platform is that it recognizes that backup, data synchronization and sharing are all just different facets of the same thing: digital media management. This awareness has enabled Memeo to deliver a suite of products that are simple to use, intuitive and work “automagically”, something we look for when evaluating a new product or technology.

Memeo’s first product, memeoAutoBackup, is an award-winning real-time, continuous backup solution for both Windows and Mac OS. They’ve partnered with major hard drive vendors like Western Digital, Seagate and Buffalo, and are now bundled on the majority of hard drives shipped in North America. They then followed with a second product, memeoAutoSync, which keeps a user’s files and folders synced across multiple devices and destinations, and a third, memeo Internet Disk, allowing backup and sharing of files and photos to an internet-based drive. Finally, Memeo will soon be releasing a beta version of their next-generation product, memeoShare, which will enable simple sharing of files among multiple users, which will showcase the full power and flexibility of the Memeo platform.

Needless to say, we are extremely excited about our investment in Memeo, we are avid users of memeoAutoBackup and memeoAutoSync, and we can’t wait to get our hands on the beta version of memeoShare the moment it launches. So head on over to memeo.com and try their great software for yourself, we think you’ll be impressed with its simplicity and power.