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eCommerce - Monday, September 15, 2008

Freelance Tech Support's Crossloop Raises $6M

When we were having trouble with a Mac recently, we scheduled an appointment with a "genius" at an Apple store to have an expert take a look. The genius put us on notice that Apple geniuses do not have domain expertise on Microsoft software. The trouble is that if we had called Bill Gates' goons we bet they would have blamed the issue on Steve Jobs. With that experience and many others we buy the premise behind Campbell, CA-based Crossloop which aims to make is easier to contract tech support online.

Crossloop has just closed a $6M second round. Venrock is leading the round with previous investor El Dorado Ventures. El Dorado led the $3M series A last year. The startup has developed three basic features - an online database of tech helpers (now at around 12,000), remote screen viewing, and payment. So there is nothing mind-numbing here in terms of technology but again we like the growing marketplace plus the opening here for good marketing to bring in business.

For competition we initially thought of the likes of eLance and Guru but those businesses or more for long-term development contracting. There are a great number of remote access products on the market that are used by freelance it support people, LogMeIn probably being he biggest.

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