Next hottest thing on the net Yodlee.com, huh? Desi boys at it again.
beta.yodlee.com
After Junglee and Yahoo, it's Yodlee
Richard Springer
SUNNYVALE 19 OCTOBER
HAD enough of paper work? There is now a website that can put you up-to-date with your pending bills and bank statements.
Yodlee.com manages and organises all of a computer user's personal data on a single page. With Yodlee, a person can get instant updates on one site of bank statements, phone bills, credit cards, stock portfolios, auction site bids and e-mails.
Analysts believe that Yodlee has the potential to become the next hottest thing on the Internet.
Yodlee supports more than 700 sites in over a dozen categories, with more being added every day. According to Mathew Idema, its vice president of product development, Yodlee provides "a tool so that all of a person's personal information can be summarised and maintained at one place."
"We are much more personal than the `My' sites," he said, adding that Yodlee "wants to leverage technology where you really want to use it." One feature on Yodlee is a real time saver. When a user clicks on any account, a window automatically opens and the user is logged into the account.
David Card, Internet analyst at Jupiter Communications, said that Yodlee offers a way for users to have a "portable identity" on the web, a category Jupiter predicts will be one of the next hot things on the Internet.
Yodlee.com has significant backing from Indian American Internet pioneers. P Venkat Rangan, co-founder and CEO of the Sunnyvale- based start-up said investors and advisers include Hotmail founder Sabeer Bhatia, Exodus co-founders K B Chandrasekhar and B V Jagadeesh, Amazon.com vice presidents and Junglee co-founders Ram Shriram and Rakesh Mathur, Integrated Systems founder and chairman Naren Gupta and Microsoft senior executive Vijay Vashee.
Rangan, who did pioneering research in multimedia and the Internet at the University of California at San Diego and wrote his doctoral thesis on network security at Berkeley, said the company has moved rapidly since Yodlee was founded in December.
From the original five founders, the staff has grown to over 42 employees. The demo product was developed in just two months in December-January and it took only four days to raise $4 million from angel investors.
Rangan said that a recent meeting with venture capital firms to raise another $15 million received commitments from five of the six top firms approached. The $15 million round is expected to close soon and the formal product launch is tentatively scheduled for November 10, he said.
Yodlee got its name, Singh said, from the fact that two other Internet successes, Junglee and Yahoo, are prominent in an old Hindi song. The founders said that the word, "Yodlee," is supposedly spoken in the song and they wanted to follow on these success stories. ? (IANS via FE 10-20-99)
Company co-founders include Sam Inala, chief technical officer and developer of the NetShow high performance video server at Microsoft, vice president of engineering Ramakrishna "Schwark" Satyavolu, who developed backend features of Microsoft's project management software, P Sreeranga Rajan, an alumnus of the Stanford Research Institute, and Sukhinder Singh, vice-president of business development and a former e-commerce partner builder at Amazon.com .
Singh who worked in strategy and business development for News Corp's British Sky Broadcasting in London and in investment banking at Merrill Lynch, told India-West, "We want to give consumers control of their personal information in a way that has never been done on the Internet." |
