Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Osman Rashid

Kakai Raises $7.5 Million From Andreessen Horowitz, Josh Kopelman, and Ron Conway

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 23:20:36 +0000

Kakai is a stealth company that was started by Chegg founder Osman Rashid and Babur Habib. Interestingly Kakai is still in stealth and raised a Series B round of funding already. The second round is $7.5 million and the investors include venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Josh Kopelman, and Ron Conway. Marc Andreessen is joining Kakai’s board of directors as a result of the funding.

Kakai’s previously raised $1.85 million in Series A from Osman Rashid and Mike Maples. Rumor has it that Kakai has something to do with electronic readers. The portable consumer electronics products made by Kakai will be Linux-based. Kakai currently has about 40 employees. Rashid’s other company Chegg.com has about $144 million in funding and was started in 2005.

Chegg Co-Founder Osman Rashid Working On A New E-Reader Startup, Raises $1.1 Million

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 23:22:11 +0000

Many of you know Chegg as being one of the first online textbook rental companies. Jim Safka, former CEO of Ask.com became the CEO of Chegg in early June. With Safka now on board, that freed up some time for Chegg co-founder Osman Rashid to focus on other ventures.

Specifically, Rashid is trying out a new venture called Kakai. Kakai has even raised $1.1 million according to an SEC filing. Kakai is currently in stealth mode, but they describe themselves as a brand for “portable electronic devices for receiving, displaying, reading and playing electronically published materials,” according to paidContent.

Rashid remains as Chegg’s Chairman and Kakai may actually be linked to Chegg. Considering that Chegg is textbook rental and Kakai is possibly developing an e-book reader, there may be a way to connect the two that we don’t know about yet.

One of Chegg and Kakai’s angel investors is Eric Di Benedetto. Another Kakai co-founder is Babur Habib, a previous manager at consulting firm Exponent. Habib has about 8 years of experience in electronics technology which will be instrumental for the development of an e-reader.

Jim Safka To Become CEO Of Chegg

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 21:40:34 +0000

Jim Safka stepped down as the CEO of Ask.com in the middle of last month and will now be moving to another online company, Chegg.com. When Safka stepped down from InterActiveCorp’s search engine company, he said that he wanted to work on something smaller and more local-based. Chegg is an online textbook rental service that was started in 2003.

The textbooks rent for a much cheaper price than what it costs to buy it on Chegg. The company raised about $27 million in funding so far from Gabriel Venture Partners, Maples Investments, Kleiner Perkins, and Foundation Capital. The first round was $2.2 million and the second round was about $25 million.

Osman Rashid, Chegg’s co-founder will step down from being CEO and will take the chairman position.

[via paidContent]