Hot topics

    • mobile

    Comment

    Google Ventures Takes A Sip Of Milk, Invests In Kevin Rose’s New Startup

    Erick Schonfeld

    View Staff Page

    Erick Schonfeld is a technology journalist and the executive producer of DEMO. He is also a partner at bMuse, a product incubator in New York City. Schonfeld is the former Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. At TechCrunch, he oversaw the editorial content of the site, helped to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produced TCTV shows, and wrote daily... → Learn More

    Monday, November 7th, 2011
    Comments
    milk1

    Kevin Rose’s mobile lab, Milk, has a new investor: Google Ventures. The startup raised $1.5 million in a seed round last April from investors including Chris Sacca, Evan Williams, Dave Morin, Joshua Schachter, Ron Conway, Chamath Palihapitiya, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, First Round Capital, and True Ventures. The total amount now raised in the seed is $1.7 million.

    “We started talking to Google after we closed our round,” says Rose, “but decided to open it up for them as they’ve been adding a ton of value right away.”

    Google Maps is a big part of Milk’s first mobile app, Oink. And Rose wants to build in more Google technology in future updates.

    Oink lets people rate and discover things in the places around them. It is a first step at creating a directory and recommendation system for things in the physical world. When it launched last week, Rose gave me a demo, which you can watch below.


    Crunchbase

    Company: Milk
    Website: mi.lk
    Launch Date: 2011
    Funding: $1.7M

    Milk is a mobile development lab founded by Kevin Rose, Jeff Hodsdon, and Daniel Burka. Milk has announced its first mobile app, Oink, released last fall. The company has since been acquired by Google.

    → Learn more
    Person: Kevin Rose
    Website: googleventures.com
    Companies: Google Ventures, Revision3, ngmoco, Sofa Labs, about.me, i/o Ventures, Chomp, Google, Digg, Pownce, Milk, Wefollow, Six Apart

    Kevin Rose is a Partner at Google Ventures, where he primarily focuses on early-stage and seed investments. Prior to joining Google Ventures, Kevin co-founded Milk, a mobile application development company in San Francisco. Previously Kevin was the founder of Digg, and co-founder of Revision3, and Pownce (acquired by Six Apart). In addition, Rose is the founder of Foundation, a private newsletter and podcast, and formerly was co-host of the tech news podcast Diggnation.

    → Learn more
    Financial-organization: Google Ventures
    Website: googleventures.com
    Launch Date: March 31, 2009

    Google Ventures is the financially motivated venture capital arm of Google Inc., founded in 2009. Google Ventures invests in startups in industries including consumer Internet, software, hardware, clean-tech, bio-tech, health care and others. They aim to invest about $100 million a year, with deal sizes ranging from seed to late-stage investments of tens of millions of dollars, depending on the stage of the opportunity and the company’s need for capital. Google Ventures currently invests in the U.S. and has offices in...

    → Learn more