CafeBots raises $5 million from sFund

Stealth startup dedicated to Friend Relationship Management (FRM)

CafeBots, a stealth Friend Relationship Management (FRM) startup, announced Thursday morning that it has closed a $5 million first round of funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The startup is the first to be funded by Kleiner’s just-launched $250 million sFund for social apps built on the Facebook Platform.

Kleiner partner and former EA chief creative officer Bing Gordon will be joining CafeBots’ board.

Unfortunately, CafeBots is still doing a very good job of remaining stealth, so nobody really knows what they’re up to.

According to the release, CafeBots is “the first company dedicated to Friend Relationship Management,” which sounds a lot like Customer Relationship Management (CRM). If CRM is all about making it easier for companies to interact with their customers through sales and marketing tools, my guess is that FRM is about making it easier for people to interact and manage their relationships on Facebook.

“Social is the new search, and it’s a category ripe for innovation,” said Yoav Shoham, CEO and founder of CafeBots.

The startup, which was founded by three Stanford PhDs, wants to help people “extract more information from and make better use of their social graphs.” Maybe they’ll be making it easier for us to share certain aspects of our lives with certain inner social graphs within the fuller graph.

“The way we all communicate on the Web is about to go through another massive transformation as basically the world’s population transitions to Facebook,” said Gordon.

Those are big words coming from an increasingly important investor in the social world. He essentially leaves no room for any other social networks in a web he envisions dominated by Facebook.

Needless to say, we look forward to more details and a public launch of CafeBots.