Refresh Receives $10M Series A Funding to Put an End to Small Talk With Real Time Dossiers

PALO ALTO, CA--(Marketwired - Oct 8, 2013) - Refresh, the first mobile application to deliver an instant dossier about people you meet, announces today that the company has raised $10M in financing from Redpoint Ventures, Charles River Ventures and Foundation Capital. Refresh is currently in beta and available for download in the US at the Apple App Store.

Founded in 2011, Refresh set out to use the world's information to bring people closer together. The company's smart service helps mobile professionals put an end to mundane small talk. Refresh achieves this by connecting the dots between profiles, photos, statuses and events across social networks and different time periods to deliver an instant dossier just before each meeting. Whether it is a tidbit of their lives -- passions, achievements, jobs, trips taken, close friends, interests -- the Refresh dossier delivers just-in-time insights to help spark meaningful and mutually interesting conversation.

The team behind Refresh came together from Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft and Stanford, after the company's CEO, Bhavin Shah, witnessed firsthand the power insights could have on relationship building and productivity during a trip to Afghanistan with world leaders. 

Refresh's veteran engineering team, led by CTO & Co-founder Paul Tyma, has created an advanced real-time insight engine to pull information across hundreds of sources, while maintaining privacy controls, in order to deliver the most customized information possible. Every dossier is personalized depending on who's using the app and what the online relationship is between them and the person they are viewing in the app.

"It's common now for each of us to have 10+ years of posts, tweets, job history, Q&A, check-ins, etc. Now is the right time to start leveraging that fragmented information to make us more thoughtful and intelligent about our friends, colleagues, and everyone we meet."

"Over the past 18 months, Refresh has solved many difficult data aggregation, identity disambiguation, natural language processing and machine learning problems. This allows us to anticipate who you're going to meet today and consolidate interesting information about them into a just-in-time dossiers delivered to your smart phone," said Bhavin Shah, CEO of Refresh.

"Refresh complements the use of social networks by reengaging and highlighting posts that matter. Visiting multiple sites or apps just to get reacquainted with someone takes more time than most mobile professionals have before each meeting," said Chris Moore, Partner with Redpoint Ventures. 

"Refresh is great example of how technology can inform and improve our business relationships by making each interaction more personal and relevant," said Charles Moldow, general partner at Foundation Capital. "Bhavin and Paul have assembled a top-notch team at Refresh and it's exciting to watch them create a new category of intelligent applications that leverage disparate data to create an entirely new business in the process."

"Refresh is the most advanced mobile service that we've seen come out this year. Refresh has found a way to smartly interrupt its users with pertinent online information that changes how people engage with one another in the physical world. You can see it in their engagement and retention numbers," explained Saar Gur from Charles River Ventures, who also invested in Mailbox, a smart app for email that was sold to Dropbox.

About Redpoint Ventures
Since 1999, the Redpoint team has been partnering with visionary founders who create new markets or redefine existing ones. From the earliest stages, Redpoint partners have supported over 375 companies and 120 IPOs & M&As. Industry-defining investments include HomeAway, Fortinet, Qihoo, Right Media, Heroku, Netflix, Tivo, Juniper, Sonos and Stripe among many others. Today, Redpoint manages over $3.4 billion across multiple funds and invests in disruptive founders and companies at the seed, early and growth stages. For more information on our portfolio and team, visit: www.redpoint.com

About Charles River Ventures
Charles River Ventures is one of the nation's oldest and most successful early-stage venture capital firms with approximately $1.4 billion under management. CRV is dedicated to helping exceptional entrepreneurs turn their ideas into the next category leaders in high growth technology and media sectors. Since its founding in 1970, CRV funds have been ranked among the industry's top performers. CRV has offices in Boston, MA and Menlo Park, CA. For more information, visit www.crv.com.

About Foundation Capital
At Foundation Capital, we're dedicated to the proposition that one entrepreneur's idea, with the right support, can become a business that changes the world. We helped Atheros create the mobile Internet, EnerNOC invent the energy demand response market, and Netflix revolutionize media distribution and consumption, among many others. We're currently invested in more than 80 high-growth ventures in the areas of consumer, information technology, software, semiconductors, and clean technology including BoardVantage, Chegg, Coverity, Lending Club, MobileIron, Simply Hired, Sunrun, TubeMogul and Venafi. Foundation Capital's nineteen initial public offerings include Control4, Envestnet, Financial Engines, Netflix, NetZero, Responsys and Silver Spring Networks. For more information, please visit www.foundationcapital.com.

About Refresh
Founded in 2011, Refresh is the only mobile application to deliver an instant dossier about the people you know, the people you meet and even chance encounters so you can get the most out of every conversation. Refresh connects the dots between profiles, photos, statuses and events across social networks to deliver a complete dossier about the people you meet with throughout the day. Find out a person's background, their professional achievements, their passions, their vacations, and their most important relationships at a glance. Never forget someone's spouse's name again before an important meeting. Impress someone by showing your knowledge about their recent trip to Peru. Learn about common interests among your friends and associates so that you can make more relevant introductions within your social circle. With the Refresh dossier, you have everything you need to make the most of your relationships, whether it's someone you're meeting for the first time or for the hundredth time. Refresh your relationships at www.refresh.io.