Jul 12, 2012

Posted Meanwhile, In Space: Asteroid Mining Startup Planetary Resources Inks Deal With Virgin Galactic SimpleGeo co-founder and former Digg lead architect Joe Stump has raised 500K in seed funding for his latest startup Sprintly. The project management and collaboration too l is one of the first investments from Facebook Director of Engineering Andrew Bosworth and has brought together bold-faced backers like Matt Mullenweg, Simple co-founder Alex Payne, Ooga Labs’ Stan Chudnovsky, Twitter lead architect Blaine Cook, About.me’s Ryan Freitas, Chartbeat’s Tony Haile, Founders Dens’ Michael Levit, Ross Dargahi, Engine Yard’s Eamon Leonard, Brizzly’s Jason Shellen, and The Barbarian Group’s Rick Webb. The seed funding was led by Freestyle Capital. Along with the funding comes a long list of notable advisors (full list here ). “We’re trying to break down a wall between development and business,” Stump tells me about Sprintly,  “Our goal is to make workflow as smooth as possible with the products people already use. There’s no point in us going out and trying to kill email. We want to work with the flow and adapt to people’s workflow rather than reinvent it. ” Stump views Sprintly as competitive to whiteboards, notecards and Excel, “The vast majority of people aren’t using a specific tool for project management” he says. The service is similar in pricing to Salesforce and Zendesk, costing interested companies, including Live Nation Labs, $9.00 per teammate per month. Stump sees both Sprintly and SimpleGeo as outgrowths of his desire to make developers’ lives easier, “The task management and product management arena is one that every developer aims to target some day” and plans on using the new funds to hire more developers (of course! ) and a designer. Currently Sprintly is a modest team of three based out of Portland, Oregon, including Stump, co-founder Graham Blache and Ian White. 0