Berkeley, California based Wesabe will announce a $700,000 round of financing tomorrow from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (as well as a couple of individual investors), and Tim O’Reilly will join the company’s board of directors. A good overview video of the service, which launched in December, is below.
Wesabe is best described as a web version of Quicken, but with some fundamental differences that make all the difference in the world. Transactions can be tagged, for example. Also, as individual merchants are renamed by multiple users to make it more definitive (think about the crazy merchant names that appear on credit card statements), this better merchant data is automatically distributed to all other users as well.
One key difference between Wesabe and Quicken is a maniacal obsession with security and privacy. You can download data from up to twelve credit card, bank and other financial accounts. Your account credentials are never stored on Wesabe’s servers, though. You either download the data to your personal computer and then upload to Wesabe, or store your account credentials in an encrypted format on a small piece of Wesabe software on your computer. The result is that hackers can’t access your account credentials by breaking into Wesabe’s servers.
Wesabe has also spent a lot of time making it as easy as possible to leave the service. You can easily export your data and, more importantly, delete it directly from the Wesabe servers.
The service has been live for three months: $300 million in transactions have been recorded from 130,000 distinct merchants, and 1 million tags have been applied.
The company has eight employees.
This is OATV’s third investment (they also put money into Instructables and Chumby).
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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG_w4DNpPs0]
