Sampa Secures $1 Million in Series A Financing

Funds to Be Used to Accelerate Product Development, Marketing and Business Development of Free Personal Web Site Service

REDMOND, WA -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 04/02/08 -- Sampa Corporation, a leader in personal web sites that enable families and friends to privately share life experiences, today announced it has raised $1 million in Series A financing. Geoff Entress, a venture partner at Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group, led the angel round and was joined by former executives from Microsoft and Netscape, and the founder of WhitePages.com. Sampa will use the new funding to expand its business development efforts, market its new service, and further develop the Sampa platform.

"The potential market for family oriented social networking and gathering sites is immense," says Jack Gold, President of technology analyst firm J.Gold Associates, LLC. "However, the only way this market can expand dramatically is to provide extremely easy and safe deployment options that require no technology aptitude but provide the utmost in security and confidence for the user. It must be the equivalent of the point and shoot camera, a model companies like Sampa are set to exploit."

More than 70,000 users have used Sampa to create their own personal private place on the web since initial testing of the service began in May 2006. This week Sampa is launching a breakthrough free service that makes it simple for people to engage their families and friends.

"That fact that we were oversubscribed with an angel group of this quality is indicative of the potential of Sampa's service. Geoff and the group have deep consumer Internet services and technology experience -- bringing tremendous value to our venture," said Paul Gross, CEO of Sampa. "With Sampa's simple user experience and our unique approach to security, we see tremendous potential in the exploding use of the Internet by families to stay connected in a more compelling way than email or photo sharing sites."

About Sampa

Sampa makes it easy to create a personal, private place on the web to share life events with family and close friends. With a Sampa site, users can share stories, photos, videos and life milestones with simplicity -- with the assurance that only those people you invite will have access. Sampa features easy-to-use themes for major life events and milestones such as the "new baby" in the family, the "kids' achievements" and "family events" like reunions and vacations. The service can be accessed free of charge at www.sampa.com.

Based in Redmond, Washington, Sampa Corporation was founded in 2005 by Marcelo Calbucci, CTO, a former development manager at Microsoft. CEO, Paul Gross, formerly senior vice president of Mobility at Microsoft joined in 2006 to accelerate Sampa's growth.

Sampa is a trademark of Sampa Corporation. All other trademarks and brands are the property of their respective owners.

Media Contact: Cathy Caplener cathy@becausepr.com 310-428-7476

2008-04-02 17:16:18 0326884 MARKETWIRE