Not sure whether to call this an exclusive, but it might be as I type this: my email friend Adam Green just let me know that Grazr.com — the embeddable feed-browser app — just closed a $1.5-million round of financing from two angel investors, and has added the legendary Dan Bricklin, creator of VisiCalc, to its board. There are more details on Adam’s blog.
In a nutshell, Adam says the lead investors are Bruce Twickler and Louis Page, Boston-area angels. Both have worked with him in a previous lifetime, back when Adam was the chief technology officer at Andover.net. That company, which rose to prominence during the late 1990s as a portal for Linux-related news and content and eventually acquired Slashdot and went public, raising $72-million or so, was itself acquired by VA Linux in 2000 for a little over $1-billion, and Adam took a break and went to Harvard to get a Master’s degree in Science (he’s got a bio here.) Then he got interested in feeds and helped start up Grazr with Michael Kowalchik. TechCrunch had a pretty favourable piece about Grazr last fall, written by Marshall Kirkpatrick.
Grazr is a mini-feed browser, which displays an OPML file — essentially just a list of feeds — in a small, configurable window, like the one I’ve embedded in this post. You can browse through the list using the controls on either side of the window, and the newer version of the app allows you to plug any URL or OPML file into an address bar. I have one in my sidebar as a kind of interactive blogroll, and Ian Delaney does a similar thing at Twopointouch.
In a sense, Grazr is a little like Bitty Browser, but specifically for RSS feeds. And the company says that it has plenty of things in the pipeline to add to the app, including ways of monetizing it through corporate co-branding, etc. Best of luck to Adam and the rest of the team at Grazr.