Google Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners fund Astrid

AngelPad startup gets $500k-plus in seed funding for Android productivity app

San Francisco-based Astrid announced Tuesday that it’s raised a seed round of funding, led by Google Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners. Individual investors, such as Jack Herrick, who ran WikiHow and eHow, as well as Nathan Stoll, one of the founders of search engine Aardvark, also participated in the round.

The round was not disclosed, but it’s more than $500,000, and enough to build out the team and the product, said Jon Paris, one of Astrid co-founders.

Astrid, which is currently taking in up to 10,000 beta users - sign up on its homepage), helps people manage tasks and to-do lists on their Android phone (and soon iPhone). 

Since being downloaded 1.5 million times in the past year, Astrid has found its service adopted and well received by college students, who are collaborating and managing tasks around homework, said Jon.

For couples, the Astrid productivity app works well when managing kids' schedules or grocery lists. Rather than post reminder text messages to your spouse to, say, pick up the kids, Astrid can send reminders so you don't have to.

Additionally, Astrid is announcing group texting, where you can share stuff like grocery lists with your spouse and add comments and photos to the list.

Astrid is one of the recent graduates of the AngelPad program, an incubator founded by several Google alum, including Thomas Korte (who is speaking at Venture Shift next Wednesday). AngelPad gave Astrid $20,000 in funding for some stake in the company. AngelPad also helped syndicate the Astrid round.

It was through AngelPad's Demo day that Astrid made some key introductions. AngelPad also introduced Astrid to Google Ventures. Astrid is among the 80 companies that Google Ventures will invest in during the seed-round stage.