Gist - where your inbox meets the web

Earlier this month Seattle's Gist was in the news after securing $6.75 Million in Series A funding led by the Foundry Group and including its founding investor Vulcan Capital. Today at the Fast Pitch Forum, Gist CEO T.A. McCann told a packed crowd more about his well-funded startup. As a ex-Microsoft Exchange manager, McCann clearly understands the inbox and plans to build a "smart inbox".

Gist promises to build stronger relationships by connecting your email inbox to the implicit web to provide business-critical information about the people and companies that matter most to you. By integrating with the email inbox, Gist provides an entirely new view on the data by intelligently aggregating the most important people and companies and auto-generating a "dossier" (summarizing emails, links, attachments and Tweets) for those people and companies.

Users can experience Gist via an Internet browser, as an Outlook plug-in, or on their mobile device with iPhone support currently available.  Additional email, customer management, and mobile platforms will be supported.

Gist is initially targeted at people who need to build and strengthen relationships as part of their jobs – salespeople, recruiters,  analysts, public relations firms – anyone who is market-facing and lives and dies by their ability to gather and disseminate large amounts of information about their contacts.

Gist is still in closed beta with 2,000 users and 15,000 in the queue but they have kindly offered 100 beta invites for our readers.