Borealis Ventures is pleased to announce its recent investment in Flurry, a
San Francisco-based web services company. Flurrymail, the company’s introductory product, is an easy-to-use email application and RSS reader that works with hundreds of cell phone models, thousands of email providers and carriers worldwide, and has users in over 170 countries. It strives to bring Blackberry functionality to the masses by delivering mobile email access to the more than 300MM Java-enabled feature phones that will be distributed in 2006. The low-end handset market is projected to grow at more than 50% per year through 2009.

Flurry has deep ties to the Dartmouth community. The three founders were all Dartmouth undergrads who consulted with Phil Ferneau on earlier entrepreneurial pursuits as students. That connection brought the Flurry team to Borealis with their startup.

Matt Rightmire then introduced the founding team to Henry Sohn, an early employee at Yahoo! who helped design and manage many of the company’s core products and services and conceived of and led the product development efforts for My Yahoo!, the earliest representation of personalization on the Internet. Henry has joined the Flurry team as an advisor and will bring important consumer internet product experience to the growing start-up.

“Flurry and its founders are apt examples of the entrepreneurial fire that Dartmouth is working hard to develop. We are extremely pleased to have the opportunity to help them build a business around the best-in-breed product that they have developed over the past 15 months,” stated Ferneau. In tandem with this investment, Matt Rightmire will join the Flurry Board of Directors and anticipates playing an active role with the company. Flurry will use the new funds to refine its product, advance its business model, and extend its market reach.

While the company is still in the early development stages, it has garnered important recognition for its cutting edge technology, including the “Duke’s Choice Award for Innovation” at Sun Microsystems’ 2006 JavaONE Developer Conference.

Said Mark Herring, senior director of Java Brand Marketing, Sun Microsystems, “Flurrymail has created the nirvana of next generation mobile services - it doesn’t require a phone upgrade, and it’s free!”

Hot off the heels of his company’s acquisition by Google, former @Last Software President and CEO Mark Sawyer has joined the Borealis team as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence. Mark will help us review new software investment opportunities, including a focused effort in the engineering software sector.

Prior to leading @Last, Mark was vice president of worldwide field operations for design software maker Graphisoft (BET: GRAPHI) headquartered in Budapest, Hungary. From 1993 to 2000, he was with software industry leader Autodesk (NASDAQ: ADSK) of San Rafael, California, ultimately serving as the company’s vice president of the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (“AEC”) division. Mark has also served as the president of ManagedOps of Bedford, New Hampshire, a venture-funded application services provider now a part of Navisite, Inc. (NASDAQ:
NAVI).

“Mark is a proven company-builder and industry leader and everyone at Borealis is excited to have the chance to continue working with him,” says Jesse Devitte. “Not only does he have wide-ranging expertise in the AEC/CAD space, but his experience growing companies to a global scale will be a boon to our portfolio companies, regardless of sector.”

Mark will work from his home base in Boulder, CO.