Evite Founder Gets $11 Million Invite for Latest Venture

Al Lieb, fresh out of college, cofounded Evite to make it easier for people to send each other digital invitations. Now, he's playing in a narrower business space with his latest company, ClearSlide, by trying to make it easier for sales people to close deals.

Lieb, chief executive of ClearSlide, said the connection between the two companies is that they combine the real and virtual worlds. “My whole career I’ve been interested in building real world communications,” the 36-year-old told Portfolio.com. It's a connection that, for ClearSlide, has drawn high-profile clients like Expedia, and today, an $11 million first round of investment by Greylock Partners and Felicis Ventures.

The money will go into growing both the engineering and sales team at the company, founded a year and a half ago, Lieb told Portfolio.com.

Lieb and co-founder Jim Benton, also 36 and the company’s chief operating officer, have come up with a cloud-based system they say makes it easier for sales people to put their presentations in front of decision-makers.

By using a web-based interface, ClearSlide's software is supposed to cut down the time it takes to make sales presentations, which are often pulled together using a variety of technologies from old-fashioned email to screen-sharing software like Go To Meeting. “We can overcome that time crunch,” Benton, a sales veteran who also worked at Evite, said.

According to the partners, ClearSlide is growing revenue by 10 percent to 20 percent every month, though they wouldn't disclose further information about finances.

ClearSlide is tackling a narrow but crowded software-as-a-service space. Among the startups aiming to solve the same problem are YouSendIt, and VMWare's SlideRocket, a service that allows people to share PowerPoint presentations over the web in a way similar to ClearSlide's. Meanwhile, social networks for the enterprise like Yammer and Jive could easily integrate such tools into their arsenals of offerings to business.

And the 800-pound gorilla in the sales software space, Salesforce, could also see an opportunity in the kind of work ClearSlide does. That could mean a potential buyer for the company, or a fierce and deep-pocketed competitor, as Al Hilwa, an analyst with IDC told the San Jose Mercury News.

"Companies like Salesforce, if they're not doing this in their portfolio, should be," Hilwa told the Mercury News' Peter Delevett.

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Kent Bernhard Jr. is News Editor of Portfolio.com