In an ordinary office in Mountain View, California, eight engineers led by a 20-something whiz kid are tapping out code for a free--yes, free--software application that they hope will make them and their financial backers a bucket of money. Sound like 1996? It's not.

This clandestine startup is Plaxo, and its founder is Sean Parker, the 22-year-old last seen helping Shawn Fanning build Napster. His new project is a consumer-oriented application to manage contact information in Microsoft Outlook.

He doesn't expect short-term revenue; first, Plaxo will hook consumers on the gratis software, then the firm will sell it to corporations. Though similar schemes have been dramatic and expensive failures, Plaxo has raised about $2 million from the highly regarded Sequoia Capital and Milestone Equity Partners. According to sources, this deal is the first investment in more than a year for Sequoia's general partner, Michael Moritz. (Mr. Moritz declined to comment for this story.) He also has lured former Yahoo CEO Tim Koogle to Plaxo's board.

Mr. Parker was evasive and hypersecretive when we spoke to him by phone. From what we can gather, Plaxo's product piggybacks on the Microsoft application, sending contact updates, like new phone numbers, the same way that meeting requests currently are dispatched. It's a simple take on business-oriented contact-management software--hardly rocket science.

However, a company description that recruiters are using to place a CEO at Plaxo implies that there's more to the story: "Plaxo believes that they have created a clever mechanism for solving the fundamental problem facing deployment of authentication infrastructure and digital certificates; the very same problem AOL Time Warner, Microsoft, and VeriSign are struggling to solve."

A 2000 memo by Mr. Parker is also illuminating. "Some centrality is important to monetizing a userbase, especially in the case of a consumer (b2c!) company like Napster," he wrote. "A central authority can do things like make inferences from the whole population of users, distribute bandwidth and resources effectively around the network, and connect users who otherwise wouldn't have found each other."

Translation: grab users with a simple email add-on, then plug their contact info into a database. That would thrust Plaxo into the identity-management biz, where startups like Courion already are battling Oracle and Sun Microsystems. Plaxo's product is scheduled to launch this fall. Beware the echo of the Internet bubble.