Montreal Tech Watch

Xobni, a startup offering a power plugin for Microsoft Outlook, announced last week 2 major news: their software is now officially out of beta, after 10 months of beta-testing, and the Blackberry Partners Fund has added $3.2 million in their series B round. The main investor remains CISCO, which puts in $7 million.

See original article about the Blackberry Partners Fund on MTW

Xobni was an original Y Combinator startup, with the goal of adding social features on top of outlook, as well as quick search. A Outlook user could then see the connections and history with other coworkers and any other email receivers.

Xobni received a fair amount of buzz; First Round Capital and Koshla Ventures came in then for the series A. Last year, there were rumored to be negotiating for a straight acquisition by Microsoft, up until Cisco came in to led series B.

The Blackberry Fund has announced other investments, such as Neuralitic Systems recently. Compared to Neuralitic though, an obvious connection could be made between Xobni and RIM. One could think about a mobile application; but if the key advantage of Blackberries is email, I don’t see any other way for Xobni’s future than to be integrated into the Blackberry OS. There’s potentially the behavioral aspect of a “mobile Xobni”, since delving through a correspondant’s data sounds impractical on the go, but that doesn’t seem like a challenge the Xobni team can’t solve.

Congrats to the guys at the Blackberry Fund, both in Montreal and Toronto!