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ASP - Thursday, April 21, 2005

Mimeo - Profile

HQ: New York, NY and Memphis, TN

Founded: 2000

Management: John Delbridge is interim CEO. He was hired as CFO in 1999. Previously at Salomon Smith Barney where he worked in Equity Research covering the PC and enterprise software sectors. David Uyttendaele is the CTO and a co-founder. He previously co-founded Square Earth, which later merged with Proxicom.

Investors: Series E of $5.8 million led by HarbourVest Partners, followed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Draper Fisher Jurvetson Gotham and additional private investors. GE Commercial Finance Technology Lending provided $3.2 Million in debt financing. Total funding to date is approximately $50 million in debt and equity.

Business Model: Mimeo provides online printing services and document collaboration. If you want to print, say, 20 copies of that boring PowerPoint sales deck, you can upload/format the document online on Mimeo's servers and have the finished product sent to 20 different addresses via FedEx, etc. The company also offers a collaboration service - you could make that same PowerPoint deck available to colleagues using a shared server. PC Magazine recently tested the service and gave good marks on quality and price: "An order of 100 double-sided color sheets on glossy white paper cost us $199, plus $20 for overnight delivery. A local Kinko’s wanted $213 plus tax for the same job."

Competitors: Kinko's (FedEx)

Dirt: Mimeo strikes us as one of these companies that's on to a good (not great) idea that takes forever to get off the ground. There's no shame in that game, but it's not usually one the VCs intentionally play. Competitor IKON Office Solutions recently shuttered its business document service unit - so that should help Mimeo.