No one really knows what Ray Ozzie’s next big thing is other than it’s in the mobility space, but we now know it’s netted $ 4 million in funding, according to an SEC filing. Ozzie, the former chief software architect at Microsoft and the brains behind Lotus Notes, has been toiling away quietly at the startup since leaving Microsoft in late 2010.
The news, what there is of it, was first reported by Pando Daily. There’s not a ton of detail — Ozzie has a penchant for discretion but TechCrunch and others speculate that Talko will enter the “Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) fray. These frameworks — by companies like Kinvey, Stackmob and Parse, make it easier for programmers to work on their actual applications without sweating the backend infrastructure.
The company had gone under the name Cocomo but is now called Talko Inc., according to the filing and this press release announcing that Ozzie has joined the board of Sparklabs, a South Korean accelerator.
As we reported last March, Cocomo hired a handful of folks in Boston and Seattle areas including Microsoft veterans Eric Patey, Matt Pope and Ransom Richardson.
What Ozzie does now is noteworthy because of what he’s already done. He was hand-picked by Bill Gates to be Gates’ successor as chief software architect at Microsoft. In that role, he shepherded Windows Azure through its contentious formative years and probably has the scars to prove it. He announced his exit from Microsoft in late 2010.
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