Caterina Fake’s Pinwheel raised $7.5M from Redpoint

Caterina Fake is back with a brand new venture. The co-founder of Flickr and Hunch revealed the new startup Pinwheel on her blog Thursday, comparing it (kind of) to a “Flickr for places.”

The idea is that you can find and add notes on physical places, anywhere around the world. The initial implementation is browser-based, although Fake said in the blog post that an iOS version is in the works. That can be anything — including stories, memories, found objects, information or even ads.

To kick things off, Pinwheel has raised a $ 7.5 million Series A round led by Redpoint Ventures. That’s in addition to about $ 2 million in angel funding raised last year from investors such as True Ventures (see disclosure), Betaworks, Founder Collective, SV Angel, Obvious Corp and other angels. Along with the most recent funding, Redpoint founding partner Geoff Yang has joined the Pinwheel board.

For those investors, putting money on Fake seems a pretty sure bet: Flickr sold to Yahoo in 2005 for a reported $ 35 million and eBay bought Hunch (after Fake left) for a reported $ 80 million. Of course, it’s too early to guess what Pinwheel will eventually turn into, but the open nature of the site raises some interesting possibilities.

Disclosure: True Ventures is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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