Pageflakes secures funding from Benchmark Capital

London, UK / Stuttgart, Germany, June 3, 2006 – Pageflakes, a leading player in the rapidly-growing personalised internet startpage market, announces its first round of investment by Benchmark Capital Europe, the top-tier venture capital firm behind eBay, Betfair and Setanta. The investment will be used to accelerate technology platform and product development, with the goal of establishing Pageflakes as the world’s leading personalised startpage.

Pageflakes, a recent winner of the prestigious Web 2.0 award, provides a convenient one-stop access-point to a user’s favourite web tools such as search, mail, blogs, news feeds, Del.icio.us bookmarks, Flickr photos and numerous other web services and applications. By aggregating these services onto one page, Pageflakes saves its users the effort of manually checking dozens of sites for updates every day.

Pageflakes differentiates itself with its open platform which is attracting hundreds of developers worldwide. This means that any developer, anywhere in the world, can write a “flake” - a web application such as a To-Do-List Manager, an Address Book or a Weather Module - and make it available to every Pageflakes user. Thanks to its growing community of developers, Pageflakes has been adding almost one new flake every day since its launch in March and now has 75 unique services on the site.

"We're delighted to partner with Benchmark Capital at this exciting early stage in our development," said Christoph Janz, co-founder and CEO of Pageflakes. "Their backing will boost the roll-out of Pageflakes and help make us THE web-entry point for millions of users."

"Personalised startpages will benefit from several important current trends and developments within Web 2.0, such as the rise of AJAX, RSS and open APIs", said Johan Brenner, General Partner from Benchmark Capital. "We believe Pageflakes will help users gather and sort the clutter of applications and content on the internet. We are excited to join this rapidly growing company and help drive its success.”